The Ridge Racer

This is another of my heritage projects where the major components have an interesting or relevant provenance.

It was my brother-in-law, Chris, who introduced me to the Playforever range, toy cars probably owned by as many adults as children. The toys are not inexpensive, but they are made from high quality plastic and rubber, and are designed to take a lot of abuse. I’ve been keen to make a homage to the brand; I just needed the right source material.

Earlier this year, in our last holiday before lockdown, we spent a week in the sole guest cottage on Ashridge Court Farm in Devon. The owners had carried out extensive renovations and modifications to a number of the farm buildings including the main farm house and they had a variety of salvaged timber left over. I was able to buy a 400-year-old oak roof truss from the owners and it was this I decided to use for the body of the car, based closely on my own Playforever Clyde Midnight.

The old truss turned out to be really hard to work with. The oak would have been green when installed in the roof so cracks were to be expected. I did my best to work around these but the oak was extremely dry and the act of shaping the wood seemed to encourage further splintering, shearing and splitting. Fortunately wood glue, clamps and patience sorted out most of the problems, which at one point I thought would never end. There had been some old blacksmith forged nails in the wood but I ensured the nail holes were in the bottom of the model and created tiny oak pegs to fill them. I used calipers to try to remain true to the original design though I found keeping the curves in balance a considerable challenge.

By chance, I had a 38mm ball bearing, bought at a flea market years ago, which happened to be precisely the right size for the driver's head. The challenge of how to attach the ball bearing was solved by using a stack of four 20mm neodymium magnets, pre-drilled with holes, and screwed down into a cavity below the cockpit using a stainless steel screw.

The head rests in a curved area at the base of the cockpit and seats itself with a satisfying click as the ball bearing snaps down onto the wood while remaining a fraction of a millimetre away from top of the magnet stack. This is illustrated in the video on the left.

The wood for the wheels was from an old broken and partly rotten fencing rail I found in a field just outside Cricklade. Below an unpromising surface was a interesting-grained hardwood and the dimensions of the timber were ideal.

The wheels were cut and shaped by hand (I don't have a lathe) and given a concave finish on the outer surface using a curved chisel. Hubcaps were suggested using highly-polished 30mm stainless steel washers and the wheels were fixed to the body using more stainless steel fittings. Steel wingnuts were used to echo the black plastic wingnuts on the original. Grooves were cut in the rims of the wheels and 55mm nitrile O-rings added. The axels were lubricated with bees wax and the wood finished with 3 coats of Osmo Polyx-Oil clear satin.

I'd been expecting a challenge but not quite this much of a challenge. This will most definitely be a one-off. Finally, a few more perspectives.

And finally, the Ridge Racer weighing in at 885g with its Playforever twin, the Clyde Midnight (420g).

August 2020

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse