Wooden car I made for our kids in 1993





I kind of had the MG Midget in mind (although the paint scheme matched the car I was driving at the time):


(More pictures below.)  This page is here to show the background experience I had before making the bike trailer with similar technology (or lack thereof).  I made the car for our kids when they were small.  The inspiration came from an article in Popular Mechanics or Popular Science magazine in about 1972, called something like "Rolin Armor's Wooden Wonder," about an electric car this man made for himself out of plywood, got the chassis parts from a junkyard, and used a rewound bus generator as a 15hp motor, and a half-dozen truck batteries for energy storage (although I imagine he quickly found out that batteries made for starting don't last long if you deep-cycle them!).  Top speed was 50mph.

Features of the kids' wooden car:

• McPherson-strut-type suspension, with coil springs, front and rear
  
  
  
  
• Steering wheel turns about four turns to go from full left to full right.  Under the dashboard, a rope wraps around the dowel the steering wheel is mounted on,
  
  
  and a system of pulleys under the hood reduces the ratio to the steering rack, to give a ratio more like that of real cars.
  
  (And yes, in a turn, the inside wheel turns appropriately sharper than the outside wheel, since it needs to turn a smaller circle.)

  The "knobs" at the sides are the tops of the towers, the dowels the coil springs go over.  As the springs get compressed, these dowels go up through the 1" holes in the plywood, into the empty space under the hood.
  
  

• floor, carpet, center console, dashboard.  The ground is not visible inside the car, and in fact it would float and not get water inside.
  
  
• Trunk and hood open.  The last picture above is looking under the hood.  Here's looking into the small trunk, big enough to handle things like a water bottle, jacket, and toys:
  
  The black center console between the seats is visible at the top.  The unpainted plywood with the printing on it is the inside of the trunk lid.
  
  
• I attach a mop handle at the back to push and stop it, so it'll go as fast as I can run with it, but I can pull back to slow or stop the car when necessary.  The child does the steering though.  Here I'm pushing both grandkids in it in our alley:
  
  
  and here I'm pushing 6YO grandson, running, on a local rails-to-trails conversion:
  
  

It weighs 75 pounds.  I used 3/8" plywood.  1/4" would have been plenty strong, and would have made the car a lot easier to move around, lift into vehicles, tip it up and lift it over the threshold to get it through the garage access door, hang it up in the garage, etc..

Both our kids drove home from kindergarten, two miles.  We put about 175 miles on it back then, mostly around our neighborhood.  Now our grandson drives it.  He's 6, and almost too big for it already, but I had tried him try it two years ago, and then one year ago, and it was kind of frustrating because he just wasn't developed enough yet.  It really rubs the kid the wrong way, that when you're finishing up a left turn for example, you have to turn the steering wheel to the right to begin coming out of the turn even though you're not quite done turning left.  The kid wants to keep turning it left until the car is pointed in the direction he wants to go straight.  It's nice we have a wide alley for learning, because he ends up doing a lot of unintentional 360's and 180's.  It takes many hours of training before he's able to keep it on a sidewalk that's only a foot wider than the car.



posted Dec 24, 2026, page last updated Dec 26, 2025             contact:  Garth Wilson, wilsonminesBdslextremeBcom (replacing the B's with @ and .) (southern California)  No SEO spam!