Scouts Greater Christchurch Zone sources materials and assembles Pinewood Derby car kits and wheels for use by Scout groups across New Zealand. Our aim in making the kits available is to make holding a Pinewood Derby easier for leaders so that more youth can learn and have fun at a derby. The kits are designed for maximum accessibility. By pre-drilling the axle holes, the wheels can be pressed in without without needing a drill or special sized drill bits, and we include templates and instructions to guide the building process.
Estimating and Ordering
Work starts in February estimating the number of kits required for the year and placing orders for the materials. Wheels are ordered from the USA and come in multiple shipments over the course of about 8 weeks. Pine blocks are machined and cut to order by a local timber yard. Sourcing 27,000 lead sinkers can be a bit tricky. We try to source them domestically, but were unable to find a suitable supplier this year, so a fishing supplies wholesaler is importing them for us. For the printing we use TheOnlinePrinter which I can recommend as reliable and low cost, although their lead time from order is about 5 weeks.
Block Drilling
We hold the first work day at a local Menz Shed where we set up 8 drill presses to create two production lines for drilling axle holes in the wooden blocks. In 2025 we made about 3000 blocks – that was 12,000 holes to be drilled.
Standard pinewood car axles holes are not symmetrical end to end, so we have different jigs for each corner of the block. Setup takes a while to get the jigs all aligned and testing done to ensure we get consistently accurate hole positioning. Variation in wood moisture content, density and grain means we break a lot more drill bits some years than others.
Once setup the drilling takes about 3 to 4 hours (averaging 1 block done every 4 seconds!).
Kit Bagging
Once the blocks are drilled, the next working bee is to bag up the kits. This task takes 20 to 25 people about 4 hours.
In order to keep the price as low as possible we source a portion of the wheels and axles in bulk packs and these need to be counted out and bagged up in sets of 4. Lead weights also need to be counted and bagged up with the safety labels. Labels are applied to the blocks.
Then all the components are stuffed into the zip lock bags along with the rules and template pages. Kits are then sorted and boxed up for storage until we need to ship them out.
To motivate the many volunteers required to assemble the kits the zone makes a small margin on each kit as a fundraiser towards Greater Christchurch Zone zone events including the Christchurch derby.