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That's hilarious - designing/building these cars was an eighth grade tech ed project.

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I remember making these in a jr. high school industrial arts club in the early 80's. It was called the Metric 500 race. Lots of fun, had to do documentation and all sorts of other stuff you would find in the real world if you were building something for a company.

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When I was in 9th grade shop class, we made CO2 racers. That would be in, lets see, 1998? The objective was to teach us how to successfully use power tools. I was pretty proud of my racer, and it won in the highly competitive bracket of "The 12 other people also in my 10:00AM 9th grade shop class". There was supposed to be a race later in the year against the winning cars from other periods, but it never materialized. I was quite dissapointed.

The shop teacher had a nifty launching and timing mechanism as well. I can't remember how it all worked, but I do remember that the cars ran on strings which went through eyelets we had to screw in to their undercarrages, to keep them going straight. The timing mechanism was a flag at the end of the track that got tripped by the first car to finish, and pointed towards that car. All in all a brilliant thing.

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My dad told me about him and all the engineers at work racing these during their lunch hour, in the late 40's early 50's. I guess this is what gave them the idea. He always loved the automatic centerpunch.

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