Show Stand

[bill-e-boy]

I have a number of early hot rod kits that have had extensive chassis work done to them and I want to show off my handy work. I had a good think of what I wanted.

- A black base

- LED spot lights - preferably hidden

- Pedestals to lift car off the floor a bit

- Mirrors to show off all the underside bling 

- Some sort of perimeter or barrier to keep the public back

I did a quick sketch of what I wanted and armed with my fertile imagination went to the nearest $2 emporium. A few bucks lighter I can back with a pack of black card, a bag of 16mm chrome balls, a pack of small mirrors and some fancy string

I also went to Jaycar and picked up some 3mm 15000cmd white LEDS - cheaper by the 10 - and an AAA cell battery box with a switch

I dilled out the chrome balls to fit the LEDS into and double stacked these and connected with some styrene tube I have. I set it up on a bit of customwood with a bit of blue card to check the concept. I mocked up some mirrors and found I need to have these on an angle to get the best from them. The nuts are to mock up display height

The chassis is a 32 Ford junker from the parts department

I powered the LED up and found it was too close to the car for maximum effect so I made the card larger - sorry no pix of that step

The height of the nuts was perfect so I am about to machine some pedestals from ally bar that I will polish. And continue with 3 more chrome ball stacks

 

 

 

 

[bill-e-boy]

The light housings worked fine so I made up 3 more. To fill the through holes in the beads I turned up a plug that I thought I could use as a bollard for a rope if I can get the kinks out of the string I bought for the job

The mirror needed to be angled up a tad for best viewing so a carefully cut out a wedge with my table saw. And I mean carefully as working with small suff and very fast and sharp rotating parts are scary. To make it safe I glued up some blocks of customwood and cut what I needed from the block. I then painted the edges black. The base is customwood again that I made slightly larger than my mockup piece. I shaped the edges with a router and shaped cutter. All was then sanded and sealed with clear lacquer from a rattle can. I applied woodgrain effect to the edges with oil paints. This was moderately successful. The whole lot was sealed with clear.

The black is card from an A4 pack of black card from the $2 shop cut to size and holes to suit the drillings for the light fitting and the wheel stands. The wheel stands are some ally bar I turned down to a flat headed mushroom shape so that I can use the base for a number of different models although this is being made for a specific model. The wheel stand positions were moved around to suit the gap required by the mirrors

This pix shows it all assembled

The LED wiring on the under side is via slots routed into the base. I use two short lengths of bronze filler wire to make connection point for the 3V battery pack and to have something to solder the LED wires to. The LED wires are some cores from some alarm multi-core cable I had to hand

 

And the money shot. I found a small trophy when looking for parts for another build in one of the AMT 32 kits. The chrome trophy is a 32 5W coupe - just perfect. The info board is a 32 grill shell that I found in the parts dept that was already painted so I polished it up a tad and replaced the chrome bars with a photo-reduced sign board that I whipped up in PowerPoint, photographed and imported it back into PP and then shrunk to size. I used the chrome grill insert as a pattern for cutting to size. It was than sealed with clear lacquer 

Thanks for looking

[Big Messer]

You could show more of the chassis if the car is tilted away, like higher on the driver's side, or tilting the mirror.