With all the various projects I’ve had on, my offcut trolley is overflowing with timber. If I think a piece of timber might be of some use, I save it – so I end up with lots of bits and pieces of various sizes. If it is pine or plywood, I occasionally send off a box load with my wife to her Pre-School for the kids to create with. But lately I’ve been dealing with a lot of old furniture that I’ve already recycled (or intend to recycle later) into boards and platters. Most of this is too hard for the kids to get nails into, so it just goes into my offcut trolley.
Having launched my MadeIt shop, I decided to add simple toy cars to the items I sell. These are a perfect use for some of the offcuts. I started off drawing up some simple designs and making a few that have now gone onto my grand-daughters. I then made some templates, ordered a good supply of wheels and axle pegs and started creating.
My prototypes were coloured with food colouring and then waxed (which darkened the colour) and the wheels were on a solid axle (resulting in the wheels turning in tandem). For the final design, I ditched the wax as I decided that after sitting around for a a number of days the colouring was stable and didn’t easily come off, even if you had damp hands. I also went from the solid axle to individual axle pegs so that each wheel could turn independently.
The result was 6 different designs and a first production effort of 45 vehicles, with 4 different colours used.
Having fitted a 6mm blade to my bandsaw, I was able to cut each one out on the bandsaw. The disc sander and bobbin sander were used to tidy up the shape before I hand sanded each one.
I used a paint brush to apply the food colouring, and then mixed all the colours to get something approaching black (it actually had a green tinge) for the wheels and axle pegs. Colouring 180 small wheels and axle pegs was a chore and I worked more on an immersion approach and then light brushing to ensure total surface was covered. Food colouring is interesting to use, because different timbers(and even different parts of the same timber) take to the colouring differently and you get to see the grain and other variations in the finished result.
For some of the cars I added a driver using purchased figures coated lightly with coconut oil
So my little fleet is now finished and I just have to photograph them and put them up for sale on my MadeIt shop. And my offcut trolley is just a little bit lighter!