MSRaynsford

The school asked me to cut a selection of santa keys for their Christmas fair. It was a simple drawing and cutting keys from my mdf scraps. ( svg here )

The basic car framework  needs a food safe covering to go between the cake and the electronics. Thankfully when I bought my vacuum former  this project was already on the cards so it's a perfect excuse to use it. I laser cut a basic mould from ply and assembled it as a mould to form over. The cake needed to clear the wheels and provide turning clearance for the steering. These covers came out pretty well, the trouble is that vacuum forming works best with a 3 degree angle on the edges and the laser cutter cuts perfectly vertical so it was a bit of a struggle to get the mould out. This was when I introduced an air pump to the vacuum former. Applying a bit of positive pressure after forming releases the mould a little and made it easier to remove.

As well as making my own cake for cake international, I've been rather heavily involved in making these remote control car cakes. Once you add sugar paste icing and a large chunk of cake these things start to weigh quite a lot so moving them round becomes quite a tricky challenge. This car has been through a few iterations before it will go into product development, this is the first version. I decided to use the ESP8266 wifi chip to function as a controller on these devices. They're able to act as a webserver and deliver HTML pages directly to your own device without the need for any kind of app. As most of the people in the cake world seem to use iPhones and I have android seemed the easiest solution. I wanted the car to keep the traditional Ackermann steering mechanism, so I used a servo to directly drive a linkage mechanism. The little 9g servo just about coped with the turning forces but it needed to be enlarged once all the cake was put on top of it