Dude, where's my car?

For city-dwellers who park in a different place each time they return home, a simple way to remember where the car is parked: a magnetic key-holding arrow for marking a street map on your fridge.

Step 1: Shape arrow from Sculpey, attach magnets

I used Sculpey polymer clay, pressing two magnets into it and then baking the clay and magnets together. When it cooled, I crazy-glued the magnets onto the arrow.

Comments

[poofrabbit]

This is very cute!

[Mella2013]

Brilliant!

[bobg]

I was beaten to this idea, by at least one person! Looks like Tony Benn did something like this in 2000 or earlier, though his doesn't have a hook for the keys:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7550000/7550123.stm
(click on number 5)

[bobg]

...and another version, "5-Minute Project: A Parking Map For Your Fridge" from the May 2010 Popular Science:
http://www.popsci.com/announcements/article/2010-04/may-2010-futue-car

[Colonel88]

GENIUS!

[wupme]

How hot do you need to bake the Sculpey ? Because NdFeB (Neodym) Magnets can't take a lot of heat. Maybee something that hardens just with air and time could be good for that.

[bobg]

275F/130C. We used regular fridge magnets, and they worked fine after baking.

[wupme]

Then they are probably made of ferrit, they can take more heat i think. But neodym loose theyr energy at tempratures of 80C and above. Probably useful information if somebody is gonna reacreate this :)

[angelone]

hehe, good idea. but most times, when I had to remember where i parked my car, i was too drunk to set the marker anyways :) that would be the days when we're out to the old town and take the taxi back

[sonic_dan]

hey, thats a map of cambridge :D small world

[monkha]

Great map! I wish I had seen this a few years ago. We had to make a similar map, but of all the street cleaning days around our building. We just couldn't afford the ticket$. However, we would forget where we parked our car much more frequently :)

[jongscx]

Now this assumes that you have enough mental fortitude to remember where you parked it long enough to plot it on the map...

[shangrilarcadia]

clever idea

[MrK]

It's cool... But maybe if a burglar breaks into your house and you went out without your car.... ups what do you think?

[w.r.t.I.A.p.]

poor dog...

[James (pseudo-geek)]

brilliant. now I must go kill my dog because it wont stop barking.

[James (pseudo-geek)]

I actually didnt kill her, but I did scold her harshly lol.

[waterman]

how it sounds if i tell u that i have my parking place at 5 metres from my windows... and i can see allways my car on windows... and hear if the alarm goes on ... ? come to my country people... Come to Romania :D

[necromncr]

Naah, come to Slovenia! I have my car parked in front of the house and I'm in a middle of a forrest with VDSL internet connection. 10 minutes drive to capital city and we leave doors mostly unlocked :-)

[James (pseudo-geek)]

I love your country now. I think I'll come live there......

[Futrell]

Awesome.

For 12 years I lived in a very crowded area of Seattle and worked nights. Parking was a nightly 15-45 minute ordeal that found me traveling the same route of ever widening circles around my apartment. Needless to say, one parking place bled into another and there was at least two or three times that the next day I swore my car had been stolen... only to randomly find it later in some strange spot...

This is great:)

[Silvester10528]

I used to do similar with a white board when I lived in Brooklyn! It would sometimes take upto 45 minutes to find a legal parking space and that was often 4+ streets and 2+ avenues away!

[MrTrick]

Are you saying that when you baked the arrow, that the magnets were still in there?
If you heat a magnet beyond the curie point the magnet will no longer be a magnet. It looks as though it might not be a problem for normal ovens and older magnet types, but be careful with rare-earth magnets.

[Kiteman]

The Curie point gives some fun projects.

[bobg]

Yep. Sculpey baking temperature isn't that high, and of course if the magnets don't work, you could pop them out and put in good ones.

[samv]

You should call your instructable: Dude, Where's My Car? :-D

[bobg]

done.

[HamO]

Excellent instructable, nice idea. Thanks for sharing.

[mikesty]

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Barton+Rd,+Cambridge,+CB3,+United+Kingdom&sll=53.159947,-0.615234&sspn=8.833633,20.566406&ie=UTF8&cd=3&ll=52.195241,0.110056&spn=0.001102,0.002511&t=k&z=19&om=1

Are you the little black one?

[Kiteman]

What a neat idea. Slightly anally-retentive, but neat.

[mikesty]

I agree totally. Especially with the dozen magnets holding it up on the fridge :) Still neat.

[PetervG]

At first I thought this was a little thing you stick on walls of building downtown so you know where you parked your car.. lol.

[John Smith]

that's what I thought too.

[ac1D]

Same here, iwas like "Hes crazy, everyone will put arrow so he won't know!"

[a grain of alt.]

With my memory, this would be an absolute necessity if I lived in the city! Smart and simple, I like it.