Simple Car

Notes

From the picture, you can see that the axle isn't made from wood. My toys growing up had a wooden dowel for an axel. The issue I encountered as a child was that on the humid days of the north east, the wood would swell and the wheels would lock up. I chose to use a nail with the head and pointy bit cut off. I used an angle grinder because I abused a rotary tool and let the magic smoke out (and haven't replaced it - yet).

Some of the things I learned in this project were that when you copy/paste a grouping of objects, the pasted copy does NOT continue to group properly. As a result, the first cut I made, one of the sides had the locating pin holes jogged a bit higher and the car looked like it had been in an accident. If you're doing the cutouts for the windows, instead of a contour cut with tabs, you can get a cleaner cut using a pocketing operation. This saves clean up time at the end, in exchange for time spent under the spindle of the Shapeoko.

In the pictures above, you can see I cheated a bit. If you really wanted to sink the time into it, you could bevel/soften the edges of the final product in the Carbide Create project, but since I'm not building a bunch of these and I don't have an assembly line, I found it much faster to get the thing cut and glued up, then passed it over a round over bit mounted in my router table.

There is a near limitless set of changes you can make to this project:

• A hood scoop
• A trunk/boot spoiler
• Working hinged doors
• A wider body with recesses cut (so you could have an interior)
• Nicer wheels (the wooden wheels are a bit slick, I added rubber bands to give a bit more traction)
• Motorized
• Lights
• Working trunk/boot/hood
• etc

Enjoy!