This project tutorial will show you how to make dinosaur safety gear racks for storing and displaying your earmuffs and safety glasses. They can be mounted on any wall and provide a stylish and novel way to store your safety gear! There are four different dinosaurs available for download: tyrannosaurus rex, velociraptor, brontosaurus, and triceratops. You can make as many of these “T-racks” as you need (haha, get it?), and can easily add extra heads to your workshop walls as you acquire more safety gear.
These dinosaurs are laser cut from acrylic sheets and then glued together with acrylic cement. ⅛“ acrylic was used because it comes in many pretty colors and is also cheaper than thicker acrylic. Translucent acrylic was used in this post, but opaque colors can be used too.
The vector files are designed for ⅛“ acrylic, but you can easily use different thicknesses of plastic, you’ll just have to alter the illustrator files slightly. The width of the slot in the mounting plate will need to be changed, and so will the width of the interfacing notches in the bar for the safety glasses. Laser cutters typically have a 0.008” kerf (the kerf is the amount of material removed by the laser), so take this into account when tweaking the files to ensure a tight fit.
As always, please share photos if you make this project!
Note: Initially, the bar for the safety glasses was just a thin metal rod press-fit into a hole in the dinosaur’s head, but an acrylic version was added into each vector file to nicely package all the required parts on one sheet of material. However, if you like the look of the metal rod better, then all you have to do is drill a small hole in front of the notch in the dinosaur’s head, and slide in a 6” chunk of the rod.
Download: Dinosaur Rack Vector Files
