After a few years, we’ve accumulated a few cars and trophies, and the cars don’t display well (or stay put) on a normal shelf.
!
The display is just a basic box, with a cutout on some of the sides, and a slanted interior panel with some risers to keep the cars in place. I made two of them at once - one is still awaiting paint - and in this case they’ll be hung from the walls and doubling as trophy shelves.
They’re made out of medium proofgrade draftboard, and spray-painted a flat black after a light sanding. They’ll probably end up with stickers, patches, and other “race artifacts” decorating the sides.
Here’s the cut materials - 9 sheets of draftboard for two shelves:
I can’t recommend these little needle-tipped bottles enough for applying glue to finger joints. And since these will be hanging on a wall in a kid’s bedroom, I definitely wanted glue despite a nice tight press fit.
I also can’t recommend these clamps enough. Not only are they great for gently squeezing press-fit joints together, but this particular set has a feature where you can link two clamps together for larger objects (as seen here).
Finished gluing, now it dries. I left the masking on the outside during assembly in case I got glue on it (I did)
Instead of cutting the clamps out of 1/4" material, I doubled up 1/8" material so I could cut it with the rest of the pieces. Do you have enough clamps? Never.
Fast forward - the doubled-up risers get glued onto the base after some drying time. I scored the outlines to make sure they get placed correctly.
Starting the painting in my studio (Amazon box). Two coats of flat black (not pictured: a light sanding)
After drying, it has a pretty nice finish on it. Definitely good enough for what it’ll be used for.
The finished riser panel, pre-painting.
A test fitting with two cars, after the riser was put in place. Nothing is holding the riser up except the front/back panels, it just slides in there. It’s not going to bear any significant load.
And the design files. The SVG is the same one I used to cut, and there is a CDR file for Corel users if they want more source material.
PinewoodDerbyDisplay.zip (439.9 KB)
. Thx for posting the free design, very generous of you.