Every year, more than a million Cub Scouts
participate in one of the coolest Scouting traditions: the Pinewood Derby. But have you ever wondered how all those Derby
kits get produced? Well, we traveled to Idaho and Indiana to
find out. The journey from tree to track for a Pinewood
Derby car kit starts here. Huge trucks haul in sustainable ponderosa
pine logs. The logs get weighed. (This load came in at around 29 tons!) Then offloaded and stacked in the yard by
machines operating like giant birds of prey. The coolest thing about the sawmill has gotta
be the saws. The cut lumber gets trucked from the sawmill
to nearby Fruitland, Idaho, home to Woodgrain Millwork. The lumber comes into our processing facility
here, goes through our optimizer, goes through our ripsaw, is ripped, and then is cut to
size. Those blocks are then sent to a manufacturing
cell and ripped into the actual Derby cars. And then the axle grooves are put on, and
everything is machined kinda to perfection. We make sure it's measured and goes through
that whole processing cell and then comes out a block.
And that's sent to South Bend for the rest
of the process. Well, on the line we've got a progression
of components that go through. And once the box, which is flat, is formed
into a carton, it kind of marches down the line. And first there's the decal that goes into it. And then the suction cup picks up the instruction
sheet. The block's dropped in. If everything's good, it keeps on going. The four wheels will go in. The four axles. It goes into the closer where it's formed
up and put into a box of 48 at the end.
We just looked this up the other day, it was
kind of fun. Out of 17 years, we've produced a little over
23 million Pinewood Derby kits. And 200 million wheels and axles in that period
of time. One of the things we're most proud of is that
from tree to track the Pinewood Derby kit is all made in America. To me, it's kind of a legacy thing, because
our company has been around for 60 years. Grandfather started it, and Scouting for our
family is a legacy. I think it's really cool to be able to be
a part of the Scouting traditions that we took part in as kids.
And so it's really a sense of pride and something
that we're pretty excited to be a part of. Sustainability ranks as a high value in the
production process. Even the shavings and the sawdust at the millwork
become heating pellets and animal bedding. And at the assembly line in South Bend, most
of the workers have disabilities, so the focus is on training them and then finding them
employment in the community. Last year alone they placed 25 workers. So, there it is! The entire process from tree … to track..
