Lego F1 Design Preview

As mentioned in prior posts, I intend to make a display for my Lego Formula 1 cars. I do not have a ton of room in my house, being a college student, so I decided to hang them on my wall above my computer since I have some open wall space there and/or some things that could easily be moved. I also saw several inspirations of these hanging on the wall and also on book cases that I decided I would do a combination of these. I drew up some initial designs and put them into my CAD software since I intend to do a lot of laser cutting for this project. I decided I wanted these facing the side and at a slight angle since I think that would show off more of the car and be a cool feature. It would also make it harder to design around. Below is what my loose plan is for an initial design for one car:

These cares are pretty big, so the panel is about a foot tall and 30 inches wide. I plan on having them backlit, but I am still trying to decide how I am going to do that. I am most likely going to put that behind the frame pieces. I have hung up with acrylic sheets that I intend to laser cut. I made some test features like the image below to test their strength. The vertical part was to help counter the moment that these cars would create. Also, the jagged design on the diagonal is custom for each car to fit within the gaps on the belly. After some testing, I found that the vertical part was too weak and would snap, but everything else would hold.

I have already come up with a new design that I plan on testing later this week. This will still take into consideration the acrylic to give the floating feature, but it will have more contact that is stronger and should support the weight of the car just fine. This should also counter some of the sway the previous acrylic pieces had.

I intend to have these all “Stacked” on top of each other vertically like the image below (The cars are rough placeholders since I did not want to model them all in detail). Another feature I want to try and implement is mondularity so I can move these around. I plan to have the sides and bottome edges glued to the designated board, but have the tops of the side pieces have a hole for a wooden dowel that is int eh very top piece. This will allow fore me to move these around. On top of this, for the lights I plan on integrating, I am adding clips that makes it easy to disconnect a board and add it to a new place. This will also make it so I can have 1 – 4 boards on display. What is not shown is I am making a custom backing that relates to the corresponding team, racing aesthetic, and the other aesthetics I am going with. This is the title image of this post.