I recently had the opportunity to create the Gravity Cars class for the Crucible’s Youth Program. As part of that work, I created a race track based on the Nerdy Derby design.
Creating the track was a fair amount of work and involved implementing the design in Autodesk Inventor based on the original PDF from the folks at Nerdy Derby, creating tool paths for a ShopBot Alpha to cut out the pieces, gluing the segments together and assembling the track. But it was most definitely worth the time.
ShopBot cutting.
First piece!
Segments cut on the ShopBot.
Zeroing out the Z axis is important, bad things can happen if this isn’t done!
Layout of one track.
Segments glued up and waiting for assembly.
Assembling the track.
Forklifts are gentle, patient holders of tracks.
Fitting the segments together.
Segments waiting on assembly.
Inserting a starting gate.
A car wanna-be.
Getting there!
Track is done!
View from the top.
First crash, car down! Car down!
Focused time on car decorations.
All else fails, add more wheels!
Let’s see if this car will work.
That’s one happy car builder!
Wait! There’s an extra bump here! Someone get some sandpaper.
One thought on “Gravity Cars and a Nerdy Derby Track”
I work for a science museum in Toledo Ohio and we are eager to try out this project for a large scale event. Is there any way I could pick your brain about how your track runs if we used your CNC files? Is there something you would have done differently?
I work for a science museum in Toledo Ohio and we are eager to try out this project for a large scale event. Is there any way I could pick your brain about how your track runs if we used your CNC files? Is there something you would have done differently?
Jeff Stevenson