What is the best graphite for pinewood derby cars?
In the form of dry powder, Derby Dust™ Dry Lube is an effective lubricant due to its unique blends of plate like structures known as lamellae. These lamellas lay parallel to the direction of motion built during the "break in" process. The unique characteristics of Derby Dust™ Dry Lube allow the layers or lamellas to easily shear over each other resulting in low friction.
( Closeup of Derby Dust™ Dry Lube. Human hair pictured as a reference. The lube even sticks to it! )
In addition to layers of dry lube, Derby Dust™ Dry Lube incorporates lubrication at the micro level with the use of finer mesh lubricants. Know that the peaks and valleys of your wheel and axle set are being protected from friction. The larger particles in Derby Dust™ Dry Lube best perform on relatively rough surfaces at low speed, while its finer particles perform on smoother surfaces at higher speeds.
What does this mean? Simply put no matter what your chosen level of polish, Derby Dust™ Dry Lube can be used as a lubricant for your build. With proper break in process, you should have a near frictionless surface for your race day.
People can’t tell us our lube doesn’t work because we use our dry lube for every build. Our faster builds are reaching speeds of 12.40 fps with sanded BSA wheels and sanded axles and are still accelerating at the finish.
In our testing, the best graphite was pure flake, high purity (99% pure), with a medium to fine particle size. Max-V-Lube meets these characteristics, and was the top performing graphite in our testing. You can find Max-V-Lube Here. What about graphite with molybdenum (moly)? Molybdenum is a hard metal that is used as a lube in some industrial processes which require a lubricant with no electrical conductivity, high pressure, and high heat. None of these conditions apply to pinewood derby racing. In our testing the addition of molybdenum to graphite did nothing for performance, but did scratch the axles that you just spent so much time polishing. How do molybdenum disulfide (MS2) and tungsten disulfide (WS2) work with pinewood derby cars? Marginally. Graphite easily outperforms both of these lubricants We can only use “Dry White”. What do we do? Dry White is a Teflon powder lubricant. In our testing, Dry White performed very poorly. In fact, running without lube was superior to running
