Little Vehicle Series

I decided that I needed to expand the little vehicle series by three more.  This makes it an even ten vehicles.  The ambulance was a simple design, my son wanted a cement truck, and I wanted to do a forklift.  That is where the designs came from.

First, the easy one.  The ambulance is pretty straight forward and can be made into a box truck.  There really is not much too the design.

The forklift was much more challenging.  The biggest struggle was the proportions.  It was either too big, too long or just did not look right.  I wanted something were I did not have to use a scroll saw and could be cut out with a table saw and chop saw.  Overall, I am happy how it turned out.  I will say, having a hand plane really helped out on flattening the dowel and adding the profiles.

The impossible request was the cement truck.  I could not figure out how I was going to make it.  I do not have a lathe which means that I was going to use a dowel.  I was not sure how the bucket was going to be attached and then there was the size.  I first established my constraints, the chassis was 2 ½” wide and max 4.5” long.  The largest dowel I can buy was 2” at the big box store.  This is why I love to design in the 3d modeling world with good software.  I learned quickly that I could match angles with the barrel supports and using constraints, I could determine the angle and the distance that would result in measurements that were 1/8” or larger.  Then I had the structural concerns.  I doweled a lot of the pieces.  I did not worry about how I was going to make all the parts until that time came, and I procrastinated it.

Toughest part was the barrel.  I ended up setting my band saw at 45 degrees and putting in stop blocks.  It turned out easier than I expected and safer than a router which was my first thought.  I then needed to do the same setup with the belt sander.  This also took time to finish because I needed to tape off a lot of parts.  It came out well and my son is happy.