DIY Pinewood Derby Trophies and Certificates

I've mentioned that we have made trophies for the Cub Scout Pinewood Derby the past couple of years, but I wanted to show a more detailed post on how to make them.  So here we go...

We had 2 sets of trophies - - the overall winners, that's 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, and then the winners of each den. The overall trophies were made with regular matchbox cars and the den trophies were mini-trophies and made with micromachine type cars.

First, gather your cars (we found a few in our basement toy stash) and paint them.  For the gold we used gilding, for the silver it was spray paint, and for the bronze it was acrylic craft paint.  That's because that's what we had on hand.  Trevor headed up this whole project:

   

Next prepare the stand - it's two pieces of scrap wood.  I forgot to run out and take tutorial pictures while he was cutting the pieces, but you can get an idea from these pictures.  Predrill where the pieces go together so that when you screw them together the wood doesn't split.

It's just one screw that holds it together, coming up from the bottom:

Here's a view right-side up - the "stand" part is slanted a little to display the car on top.  Also, each trophy is a different height - 1st place is tallest, 3rd place is shortest.

Then after the paint has dried on the car, just glue it to the top of the stand.  We used Gorilla Glue because it grows and fills in the cracks:

And there you have it - thrifty and easy Pinewood Derby Trophies:

We also made some Pinewood Derby Certificates because I tried searching online and couldn't find a free printable so we had to make our own - and I have it so you can download it!

So here's a JPEG image, you can click on it to make it bigger, then right click and save it, etc.  If that doesn't give you a high enough resolution, I think I loaded it where you can DOWNLOAD IT HERE.

These are given to each boy, and they win various things like "most creative paint job", "most creative", or "most realistic looking car".  They enjoy seeing what fun category they have won:

 If you have a Cub Scout participating in the Pinewood Derby, or know someone who does, I hope this is helpful.  Happy Racing!!