Thread: Toy Garage

Wood (Well, fiddleback MDF and tasoakus broomhandlus)

Time taken: 2hours.

Bet the kids will have a ball. Simple but very functional (spoken from a damn big kid ) Well Done Lefty

Very neat, and a lot of fun I bet

Excellent. I hope you have a lot of fun playing with it.

BTW, what CAD tool did you use?

Hey Lefty, are you sure it is a garage, it looks suspiciously like a multi story car park to me. The good news is that as in real life, the more cars your kids have you can add more storeys.

You could even start charging a parking fee and a levy to claw back some of the pocket money, thus reducing the amount of cars in the car park and the need to add more floors. A valuable lesson in business management for the future, there's no such thing as a free lunch.

Thanks all.

Stubchain. Look at my user profile. I'm a transport economist. I've spent a lot of time doing financial viability analyses and income modelling for multi-storey car parks and metered parking. I've even designed a few carparks.! I know more about parking than I ever wanted to when I started this job.

CAD: The CAD tool was Ecotect. It's actually a commercial building design tool that allows not only design, but thermal, lighting and environmental analyses of those buildings. Not very good for woodwork but fun nonetheless. I designed a patio for our house and it enabled me to work out exactly how much to raise the roof to allow the winter sun to get to the window but maintain shade in summer. (It's about 600mm above the gutter). You just put in your lat/long and it does the shadow simulations. Cool!

Design: It's for a family daycare so SWMBO wanted it to be simple, strong and mult-functional, so no petrol pumps, elevators, signs etc etc. Still needs to be sanded, painted and sealed.

Hi Lefty,

WOW you are a brave man to admit to the modelling of car parking and meters, it is a source of constant frustration for many of us. Please don't tell me you modelled the Trafalgar car Park in Hobart. It is by far the worst designed car park I have ever used, I am forced to use it by my employer, it's not very user friendly.

I meant financial modelling, but we do the traffic engineering and car park design as well. I'll look it up and, if they have problems, we'll send them a proposal

A brave man? Why? Parking is akey tool in traffic management in cities. The more people have to pay the better if you ask me.

Nice parking Garage Lefty

I'm sure the kids will get full use out of it.

That sounds like a nice program. Probely big $$$$ I have a few home desgin programs but not sure if thay will do that light thingy ( lighting is pour in all of them )

She now wants a cubby house, a play kitchen, a few mallets, a heap of MDF cubes and some outdoor play equipment. Surely theres some tool budget in there!