A Christmas present I made for my grandson, who is crazy about what he calls diggers, i.e. backhoe loaders, or JCBs, as they are
more commonly known in the UK. Made using plans from www.toymakingplans.com, with some modifications, mostly in scaling.
The original plans called for most of the components to be made from 1/2 inch thick timber, not a common size in the metric UK!
I had a load of good-quality 15mm birch plywood, and wanted to use that, so I scaled the plans upwards by 20% when printing them
out from the pdf file. The plans specified commercially-available wooden wheels, but, as I had a wood lathe, I made the wheels myself.
The other mod I made was to the decals - this was an American design, so the decals were for the company Caterpilar, or Cat, again not
common in the UK, where these machines are known generically as JCBs. A quick search of the Internet found some images of the JCB logo,
which I printed out on photo paper and applied to the loader struts. The model was finished in child-safe varnish and home-made wax polish.
Overall length of the model as shown in the first image is about 15 inches (40 cm).