Gravity Racer

Brett and Malachi are a father and son team from just outside Chicago.  They built a DIY push cart gravity racer out of Maker Pipe that really blew us away.  It is reminiscent of the soap box derby car racers that everyone has seen but with a different twist. We loved it so much that we featured them on our NYC Maker Faire flyer! Their build really shows off their teamwork and creativity.

These guys really took a great design approach to building this cart.  It's the trifecta... concept drawing, scale model out of Legos, and finally a full size mockup.  Well done!

There are lots of impressive features of this build, but two of the best are the double bend EMT conduit roll cage, and how they integrated wheels into the build.  Anyone that has bent electrical conduit before knows that it is a skill.  Here they put not one, but two bends into the pipe AND got them to mirror each other. No small feat!

The wheels were done by putting threaded rod all the way through the conduit to act as an axle. They used PVC pipe as a bushing in between the threaded rod and inside diameter of the electrical conduit. This looks to be a great approach and would work for many different types of builds. Threaded rod like this can be purchased from your local hardware store. They also used two nuts on the outside of the wheel, which is a common way of locking them into position.