Hit The Road Jacks

Once a year, my best friend and I make a road trip through Europe. Or at least a small part of it. OK, let's be honest: we drive to Luxemburg, open the roof, take the smallest roads we can find and drink beer. Not useful at all. But a lot of fun. Or FUNK, as you wish.

We don't use any modern electronic devices to plan our trip. We use an old fashioned map. And that is where the problem starts. How do you lay out the map over the hood of the car and be cool, without having the map blown away by the littlest of winds?

My solution to this ego threatening situation is called the Hit The Road Jacks: small buttons with small magnets in them, so that you can mount your map to the hood of your car. Made of flexible material, so that it wil not damage your beautiful paint.

Designing them was great fun. Printing them takes some attention. Let me tell you more.

The bi colour design and the addition of magnets requires printing in four steps:

1. The bottom
2. The first colour change
3. Adding the magnets
4. The second colour change

I empirically found out that it is best to print the buttons one by one. For my friend, I printed 10 of them, taking half an our each. That means 5 hours of printing and inserting 30 magnets. No big deal, concerning the fact that they will last forever and put smiles on faces for generations to come.

What I used:

• Fiberlogy 30D flexible, yellow, for the outsides
• Fiberlogy 40D flexible, gray, for the insides
• 3 magnets for each button, 6*2 mm

As you can see in the pictures, I made three different designs:

• Flags for the start and finish of your route
• Stops for, well, the stops. For your lunch, or for visiting a museum
• Arrows for showing the direction in which you want to go

Happy Road Jacking!