One of the things I’d wanted to do with a laser from before I even ordered one was play around with scale models of larger projects I want to make. I finally got around to realizing those plans! I’ve been wanting to build a car cockpit to hold pedals and a steering wheel for racing games. I plan on building it out of plywood, but decided to start trying to wrap my head around my idea of having interlocking pieces so I can just take it apart by sliding them out and flat pack them into a closet when not being used. I’ve started with a simple design and scaled it down to fit on scrap cardboard box flaps. The first version cut out quickly enough.
After starting to assemble it I was able to find a few basic flaws in the spacial relationships between various pieces, but was still able to get it together after some modifications.
the seat back wasn’t lined up to interlock properly with the seat base. The seat base wasn’t fitting properly with the sides and the top steering wheel mount was too close to the chair. Most of it was just simple mistakes where I forgot to account for the sliding of the interlocking parts. A few tweaks in illustrator and it went together much better. I couldn’t find a good scale for it, but Han did his best to help illustrate.
He’s got to grow a bit more to reach the pedals
The next step for me would be to scale it up to 1:1 size and find the measurements for things like the pedal set I want to use since that will determine the size of the foot plate in the front. I want to do some more optimizing of the design as well to see if I can find a way to get it all cut from a single sheet of plywood. I may be able to do that while also making it easier to get in/out of. Finally I’ll try cutting it out of plywood when I’m confident it’s pretty close to a working design. At that point I’ll try playing with another CNC toy, the Shaper Origin
