Waiting for another online meeting to start, puttered and thought about wooden props, had other thoughts/questions:
– Does it need to be A Car, like a box you get IN, or could it be a left-side-of-car wall that you sit behind and shoot through the window? Make it a foot wide and now you have a "hood" or "trunk" to shoot over, hide behind?
– Why wood? Not as a challenge to say "get a car!" but what is it meant to solve? If zero spall, etc. then wood won't do it super well. Especially things like chipboard can spall enough to injure people, to embed fragments into items downrange a foot or two. . Do you need all wood, so no fasteners also?
– I'd look into things like building a spaceframe, using coroplast for "body panels." Light, sturdy, easy to repair, not sharp when shot or otherwise damaged. If not sturdy enough to rest on the hood: have you sat on a modern hood? Get folks used to that!
– Too many times throwing away seats and chasing possums out of things: I'd make the interior a flat floor, and put chairs inside it. Remove chairs when done shooting for the day.
- Don't forget you can get specific chairs not just whatever is laying around; folding beach chairs are very low, so can be good to simulate sitting in a car (more than an SUV) then fold and hang on the wall of the conex where your targets are stored. You can even make brackets, so the chair fits and doesn't slide, or even thumbscrews or bungees down, so isn't just loose on the floor.
– Similar, make center consoles a cooler that you put next to the seat. The glovebox similar. Shelves and brackets, not actual compartments that will become full of mice, or bees.
– Make it weatherproof, not by lots of paint and marine plywood, but by making the floor something like decking so it vents, and/or making sure it can be flipped and stored on the side so nothing accumulates in it.
– Move around? By picking up, or are wheels okay? If wheels are okay, my goal would be one person to move it around.
– If wheels: back to one of my first questions: do they need to shoot under it?
– Consider wheels that come off. It sits on the ground on wheel-shaped wood, but you lift, stick bicycle wheels on the sides to roll it around.
– If real wheels like car tires, chock it instead of trying to build brakes.
– How repairable? Is it expected to be shot? If so, that takes a lot of design, to avoid damage being catastrophic. See the coroplast thing above, and otherwise make sure no screws are under another board, but all bits can be removed individually, and everything is just dimensioned lumber so (aside from weird stuff like wheels) just cut to length, screw down. No ripping, machining, etc.
- Shape wise: think hard, and look at cars. Cars are not dead flat and square. I'd taper the hood a lot, for example, if trying to get people used to modern shapes, using cover/concealment even a little realistically.
NO need to answer these. Just feedback, thoughts.
I have disappointingly few photos of the props I am referring to, even those I have helped build, so only words to share