Cardboard Hot Wheels Vehicle.

My dad has 1,000's of hot wheels so I had the idea to make him one based off a car hauler he built from the ground up during 89-90. He called it the Super Chevy Hauler so making him a cardboard one hot wheels size was a crazy idea I had one morning & I thought "Why Not" & got to work.

I began by tracing a card from an old hot wheels I have. I used cardboard which serves as dividers in canned catfood boxes for not only the card (which is perfect thickness) but also the actual little vehicle. I simply cut it out & used spray paint to spray 3 light coats on the card after getting it cut out going different directions with the spray each coat. I then let it sit out in the sun for about 10 mins before bringing it in the house to finish drying. Do not leave it in the sun longer than that because it will draw it up and warp the card.

After the paint was dry I made a stencil of the hot wheels logo which I cut out to use as a template to spray red logo on the correct spot on the card. I then had painted the Hot Wheels words on the red after lightly drawing the letters using a mechanical pencil. I wrote the information about the vehicle on the back of the card using a fine tipped sharpie. Much easier to do it now when the card will lay flat than after installing the bubble.

Next I started working on the actual vehicle. I sketched out the sides, top, bottom, back, and front & on the bottom I cut in for the wheels & folded up the cardboard using these as more support. I used hot glue to hold it all in place getting the desired shape by the time the glue dried. For the wheels I used a black crayon & exacto knife to cut them to the proper size. Hot glue would not stick to the crayon so I used flexible super glue purchased at the dollar tree.

Once I had the truck body finished I used elmers clear dry all purpose glue to spread a then coat all over the truck & let it dry in the sun. Next I used white spray paint to put the base color down & finished all the details of the truck with gel pens and acrylic paints. I had to use tweezers for some of the smaller parts & used a toothpick as sort of a paint brush to get some of the smaller details on.

Now I had to find a bubble from an existing hot wheels vehicle that would actually fit the truck. The real truck is 33 feet long so the scale of this is smaller than a typical hot wheels because I was limited by the blister pack width. Luckily I had one from a H20 speedboat hot wheel that fit the bill perfect. One of the toughest parts was getting all the original backing material off the plastic bubble. I thought goo gone would work better than it actually did so I had to use sandpaper to get all traces of the old cardboard and glue off until the bubble was clear. I then used my elmers clear dry glue all & tiny clothes type pins to hold it in place until the glue dried completely clear which took 2 days.

After getting it in a protector case I was ready to hand it over to dad on father's day. He really loved it & it's definitely one of a kind. By far the smallest vehicle I've made out of cardboard.