I designed the car well in CAD. My thought was to 2.5d manufacture it with Balsa. I got some thin strips of Balsa wood from a local model airplane shop.
First, I sectioned my CAD model every 0.5 mm.
Then I printed the shapes
Cut a form out
Cut some tape
Tape the cut out image onto the balsa wood
Drilled a couple of alignment holes
Holes now drilled
Used a razor blade to trace the image on the paper onto the balsa.
Paper is now cut.
Take the taped paper off
Use the razor to cut the image all the way out of the balsa.
Remove the balsa section
Placed on the guide pins.
Repeat. A lot. Stacked all the balsa sections up. Epoxied them together, and covered the whole thing in a thin coat of wax.
Here are my attempts. My "try again" garage.
In the end, this didn't work either. Problem is, when you stack up 96 pieces of .5mm balsa, it doesn't necessarily make a 48mm part. I was counting on the balsa being exact, and I think at that thickness, it's just too much to ask. My first model was too tall, my second attempt was too short. Anyway, I gave up 2.5d prototyping, and tried to make a tool from my balsa blank. I mixed the plaster with too much water, the plaster tool was too soft, and broke when I tried to reassemble it to pour a casting. I'm done. I'm done with doing this by hand, I'm done with plaster casting.
I'm going digital.
Total: 194 h
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