The Fire Chief arriving at the scene of a fire!
My husband and I created this fire truck for our son. DH created the frame and body and did the spray paint work and I came up with the details.
The frame was created with 70 feet of pvc pipes.
LittleBookLover is getting strong and has no concept of the destruction he can cause, so DH wanted to make sure the entire thing would be able to withstand pushing, pulling, prodding, yanking, etc. He constructed the frame with a support in the back and used hose clamps on the footrests to secure the whole thing to the wheelchair. It turned out to be well engineered and was able to withstand LittleBookLover’s attempts to pull himself up using the windshield.
Once he had the frame, the hubs used polywall (a plastic wall panel) and a heat gun to form the bottom part of the body. The top part of the body (Rescue 11) was made using an Amazon box that just happened to be the perfect size for the frame. The frames were attached to the bodies using zip ties.
Once the body was constructed and painted it was up to me to flesh out the details. I used my Silhouette Studio program to create a mock-up of the fire truck and was able to test out different designs and sizes until I had something I was happy with.
The chrome bumper and trim were made with silver wrapping paper and attached with spray adhesive. The white stripes, ‘Rescue 11,’ and ‘Fun City Fire’ decals on the sides were made with vinyl from stash (it’s kind of hard to tell in the pics, but the gold vinyl is layered on black to give it a shadow effect). The ‘Fun City’ on the front of the truck was made with gold holographic paper and black background vinyl. I used Silhouette Studio to create the grill design. First I made hexagon shapes and then I used them to create columns and rows to create the overall grill effect. The grill design is cut out of silver wrapping paper and layered over black wrapping paper to create the finished look.
My husband came up with the idea of using battery powered stick on lights for the headlights and we picked up a red flashing light for the top. The red flashing light had a car adapter plug. DH was able to convert a drill battery into a battery with a car adapter socket that we were able to plug the flashing beacon into (seriously, that’s why he was the technical director/head engineer for this project bc I am clueless on how to do such things and in all honesty, if I had made the truck body, it probably would have been made out of cardboard 
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LittleBookLover’s outfit consisted of a pair of pants that I added reflective trim to, a navy shirt that I added HTV designs to, a pair of red suspenders, and a toasty red jacket that I added some patches and reflective trim to. With his wheelchair harness on, you wouldn’t be able to see much (if any) detail on the front of the jacket, so most of the details were added to the sides. I used my embroidery machine to stitch out the patch designs and hand stitched them to his jacket. I am terrible at hand stitching (which is a bit funny because it seems so darn easy) and it took me fooorever to stitch everything onto the jacket, especially the reflective trim on the sleeves. I tried to just skim the surface of the jacket so that my needle wouldn’t even penetrate to the interior. Unfortunately, my attempts were unsuccessful and I can’t even tell you how many times I sewed the sleeves shut 
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LittleBookLover loves toys and needs constant stimulation or he gets fussy. We came up with the idea of getting him a steering wheel toy to keep him entertained while in his fire truck and it worked out perfectly! I attached the toy to his wheelchair tray with bungee cords and it kept him entertained and as an added bonus, it added to the overall design of the costume!
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