Smackdown ring - made from scratch (completed)

This would be a great project to do in school. It will be easier to make the domes on top of the ring posts with a disc sander too. I did them by hand with sand paper and each one took about two hours (it's a lot like sharpening a pencil... for two hours!). Good luck with it

I'd love to take your money and send you a wrestling ring but making these as one off pieces isn't a realistic approach. Aside from the high cost of materials, it took far longer than I anticipated to make (around five weeks, doing bits almost every night which often entailed spending 3-4 hours to make real progress).

The best way that I could do this would be to make them in much greater numbers (meaning I could bulk buy materials and lower the cost) and also outsource some of the work or buy machines to make the job quicker. This way, I might be able to sell these for under £100. I don't think I'd be selling very many with a price tag higher than that. If I get more interest from people wanting to buy them, then I'd look into it but you're the first person to give me an offer that sounds realistic.

The other unfortunate thing is that I wouldn't be able to sell these with any WWE logos on or else I'd be a trademark/copyright infringement case waiting to happen. WWE have a deal with Mattell and so I'm sure that they couldn't grant me a licence to make these even if I or they wanted to work out a deal.

My advice at the moment would be to begin this project yourself. Like I said before, I have no special skills or tools. It's all about time, persistence and being willing to make parts more than once when things go wrong (hats off to anyone that manages to make one of these without any hiccups!). I started this thread to pass on my 'recipe' for free and I'm interested to see if people use any of my ideas. I'm happy to give advice if people ask

I'm really happy that the community here have given me such a positive response on this though, so I thank you all for that. I didn't have any particular expectations (or even if I'd get any response). I made this just with the intention of making my nephew happy but it's really nice to open my email box to find that people are liking what I made on this forum. You guys are serious collectors, artists and animators so to have received such a positive response has been really great

Oh my lord this is amazing

Yeah, you're right. The idea was both to replicate a real wrestling ring (the thin layer of padding beneath the canvas) and to make it a safe toy because of the slighlty raised screw heads beneath. It also means that the figures don't get bashed up on the ring mat when playing with them. The only downside with using foam rather than a solid surface beneath the mat is that it gets dents when the figures are bashed onto it. That said, the dents are in the foam, not the 'canvas' so you usually don't see them. Also, any such creases on the mat above can be ironed out because it's removable (you only ever see such dents on the white mat when figures are bashed really hard onto it).

As for the sound, you're right on that too. There's no bounce in the solid surface so with the addition of the foam mat it means there's no crashing noise. For people who prefer the noise, I'd suggest using plastic instead of plywood to give it some bounce and only use four dowels beneath (one under each corner) instead of nine like I used. The compromise with this is that plastic can be split/cracked and it certainly wouldn't be strong enough to support a grown man like mine does.

wow that ring is UNREAL!!! Amazing job man! I would love to see you take a stab at custom old school ppv ring aprons

Wow thats amazing

This is F***ING GENIUS!!!
Nice Job.

Amazing work, great amount of effort gone into that.

Dude that is awesome work!!! But surely it would be cheaper to buy one lol!!! . Great work!!!