Family project: DIY racing bed
My son Jasiu is 3 years old. He is a cool kid, very energetic, smart and funny. Since he was a little kid he always slept at our bed and it was always very difficult for us to make him sleep in his own room in his own bed. Lately me and my fiancé Joanna started thinking about possibilities of changing this situation and sure enough Joanna has came up with an idea of creating cool bed for our son. I love those kind of ideas so she didn’t have to convince me to it at all.
Our first choice for this bed was to make it in a shape of car. We thought in the beginning that essential for it would be to have a steering wheel and possibly car wheels that spin.
As I am not an artist and I couldn’t create my own design that I would be proud of so I dove in to google in search of some cool racing bed designs. After 3 days of research I found very cool company that creates the ultimate racing beds:
I decided to create bed very similar to that one. First I needed to create a 3D model which was going to help me figure out how much material I need for this project and what difficulties I might have to face. I usually tend to create a 3D model for any project I am doing. It adds significant amount of work but it benefits a lot. I use SketchUp Pro for any 3D modeling. There are other tools on the market like well known AutoCad but I already had some experience with SketchUp and wanted to push it a little to use it as design tool and tool that will create blueprints in 1:1. I have never done it before but after some research I figured out that I can do both in this tool. The design came out like this:
After I got that out of the way it was time to start working with real material. I ordered pieces of MDF in shapes of rectangles and sizes that matched widths and heights of all the elements. I also ordered some additional sheets of MDF to have something to work on and to have enough material to finish my project even if I screw something up. In the end the waste was not big. Overall it was about 4 sheets of standard 19mm MDF laminated on both sides. I chosen laminated MDF just to have less work when painting. I paid approx. 400 PLN for MDF.
Next step was cutting pieces in shapes that will form the car. Design was fairly simple from the beginning so that I wouldn’t have to spend too much time on cutting pieces to shape. I made sure that what I designed was going to be able to process with the tools I own. I asked how much would it cost to cut out on professional CNC router and I got amounts from 400 PLN to 800 PLN which was not a cost I wanted to pay.
I prepared blueprints in 1:1 scale and asked my fiancé to print it out on large printer that they have in their company. When I received printouts I just glued them to pieces of MDF and later using cutting tools just followed the lines and shapes. It looked like this:
After cutting all the shapes I got busy with router. I needed to round all of the accessible edges of pieces, as they might be dangerous to kids. I managed to destroy one router in the process and was forced to buy a new one. I went with: http://www.castorama.pl/produkty/narzedzia-i-artykuly/elektronarzedzia-przenosne-i-akcesoria/strugi-i-frezarki/frezarki/frezarka-jcb-2100-w.html which turned out to be a really good choice, especially because it had additional accessories to cut angles and to connect vacuum cleaner. Results:
At this point when I put everything together I had a good overview on how good this thing looks and how much better it’s going to look when I will paint it to one color. Before I was a bit unsure if I will end up painting it as it adds costs and time to the project but when I saw pieces stuck together I had no doubt that it needs this cherry on the top.
I have never painted MDF before and I have to admit it looked kinda scary because everywhere I looked for advice I could only find comments like: “Only professional painters can paint MDF”,”It’s very hard to paint MDF’. Not a lot of material on YouTube either. I called my brother and he gave me some advices on how to go about painting MDF as he has done it once before. After some time I knew the basics: you need really good primer which you will spray onto MDF. It’s almost like putty in spray. It’s very easy to work with and leaves good effects. You can’t spray paint MDF right away as it will absorb thinner paint inside like sponge absorbs water. Primer needs to dry out over night and piece is ready to be painted. I chosen white paint with high gloss effect (same kind I have in my kitchen so I would be able to compare end results). High gloss paint requires polishing in the end, another thing I have never done before so it was perfect choice :).
Spray gun painting is a discipline on its own, I already had some experience from past when painting 2 cars. It requires good equipment, space to work and space to dry and lots of time.
I had all so I got to work:
End result was pretty good I have to admit. The biggest issue I had working outside after work in the garden were … mosquitos! Other the. That rain was not getting in the way that much and the wind wasn’t too strong (those are usually the biggest issues you can face when painting outside). BTW the mosquitos weren’t the problem as it sometimes is that they ruin your work by going kamikaze into freshly painted piece, they were just biting the hell out of me.
The cost of paint was about 400 PLN.
Paint dries out and I need to polish the pieces, it starts to look really good. My fiancé Joanna is preparing foil design to make this car look like a police car as that was what our son wanted. She puts the first foil parts on car and I figured out that we can make this bed even cooler. I ordered on allegro (polish eBay) police siren (light) and special kit for the audio effect (the kind you have to solder yourself). Both pieces turned out to be good, light was super bright and audio siren was not too loud.
I also added some led lights in front to make it look and behave like real car. My son loves to go behind the wheel of our cars and play with switches and buttons so I added those retro buttons just by the steering wheel:
This was precision work, every move was reevaluated in my head twice since this was part that I’ve put hours into making, it was already painted and polished. It was not an option to ruin it. And I didn’t :). Came out to be a success. I figured I will create a switch for head lights and hold buttons for audio and light siren (just so it doesn’t drive us crazy :).
After I’ve tested everything I needed to hide all connection wired inside the wood:
The excitement builds up. I’ve put month of work into this project just hoping it will be a dream coming true for my son. We’ve put him to sleep as usual in our bed and after he started snoring we got to work. All the pieces went to his room and we were putting everything together. I finished about 3am in the morning and went to sleep knowing that tomorrow Jasiu will have a very special morning. This is the picture taken at 3am:
And this in the morning:
Hope this inspires you to get yourself into some DIY project for your family. It was a blast and the happiness of my son is the best reward you can get. If you survive to the end of this post I salute you :).
Thanks!
