The Ultimate Halo Warthog Pinewood Derby Car

thingiverse

My son and I like to go all out when making pinewood derby cars for Cub Scouts. I find this to be a time for us to work together on being creative and problem solving and teaching him how to use tools to solve his creative problems. In the past we have mad Lightning Mcqueen, Mater and Francesco Bernoulli, all from the Cars movies of course. Lately we have been playing a lot of the different Halo games which spurred him to decide to build a warthog for his Pinewood derby car this year. The body of the warthog is built out of wood. We glued on additional blocks for the fenders after he cut them out on the scroll saw. Sorry, but I did not think to take pictures of the the cutouts before gluing them together and did not save the templates we drew up. After getting the parts glued together, he used a belt sander, a dremel and hand sanding to finish the wood shaping. Next we went into tinkercad where I used this opportunity to help him learn how to design the different parts that we added for accessories. There were many rounds of designing, printing and going back to the design to make changes. Definitely a great learning experience for him. After he finished his final parts designs and printed them, we attached them to the Warthog. Many were attached by drilling a 1/16th hole and inserting the part. Other parts were attached using a glue gun. The turret was assembled by inserting the pins in the base and the rocket pods with super glue. We hot glued them together as well to ensure that they did not fall apart during crashes. The Turret was attached using 4 of the pins going through the base into holes he drilled. It was also glued down. The windshield was cut from a 20 oz coke bottle and hot glued in place. The Spartans are Megablox Halo figures that were hot glued in place. We glued a couple of weights on the back at weigh ins. All told, we spent about 40 hours over several weeks of evenings and weekends working on planning, designing, cutting, gluing, 3D modeling, printing, assembling and painting to create this. All time that was well enjoyed! He ended up in the middle of the pack for the races, but won a trophy for Best Overall Design!