Documentation can be a bit of a nasty word, but it’s certainly one aspect of our own design process that we all wish we could improve upon. As an award-winning designer, working with some of the best toy companies around, [Jude] knows a thing or two about showing your work. In his SkunkWorks Project, he takes a maker’s approach to Bo Peep’s Skunkmobile and gives us a master class on engineering design in the process.
As with any good project brief, [Jude] first lays out his motivation for his work. He was very surprised that Pixar hadn’t commercialized Bo Peep’s Skunkmobile and hoped his DIY efforts could inspire more inclusive toy options from the Toy Story franchise. He does admit that the Skunkmobile presents a more unique design challenge than your standard, plastic, toy action figure. Combining both the textile element to create the illusion of fur and the RC components to give the toy its mobility requires careful thought. You definitely don’t want the wheels ripping into the fabric as you wheel around the backyard or for the fur to snag every object you pass by in the house.
Given the design challenges of making the Skunkmobile from scratch, [Jude] decided the best way forward was to retrofit a custom-designed skunk-shaped body onto a standard RC car chassis. The difficulty here lies in finding a chassis that can support the weight of the retrofitted body as well as one big enough to hold a 9- ..
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