Wooden Push Car

Simple, eco-friendly and non-toxic wooden car.

Things you need:

• Scrap wood
• 4 wheels (or another piece of scrap wood if you use a hole saw)
• eco-friendly paint
• sanding paper
• hand saw (or a jig saw)
• drill (or preferably a drill press)
• 5mm dowel (approx 10cm long)
• glue (epoxy)

I have a whole box of leftover scrap and cut-offs, with pieces that are sometimes not even 10cm long. Take whatever you have left over (you can even glue two pieces together) and roughly draw (with hand) your template with the pencil. Cut it out with a jig saw or sand it down with a sanding machine. You can avoid splits with some masking tape.

I drew the shape of the car on the left over timber and used a miter and a jig saw to cut out the shape and then I sanded it down with a 80 grid to the shape I want. Afterwards I sanded the car down with a 240 grid.

Drill two holes (with drill if you have a steady hand, but preferably with drill press if you have one) for the wheels, which are slightly (1 or 2 mm) bigger than you dowel is, since you want to make sure that the wheels turn nicely.

Before fitting the wheels I painted the body of the car and parts of the wheels. Use only non-toxic paints.

My original plan was to make a wooden wheels with a drill press and a hole saw but since I had these wheels at home (I bought them once in a local diy store), I just went with them.

I cut two dowels (I used 5mm) and pushed them through the holes. Glue only the wheels to the dowel. Make sure that dowel is not glued to the body of the car, because you want wheels to rotate.

Don't throw away you scrap wood. It can always come in handy.