If you have a kid that loves cars, trucks, or anything that remotely resembles a vehicle of some sort you’re in the same boat as me. One vehicle that my son cannot get enough of is the giant wheeled monster trucks that are totally better bigger and better at crashing and smashing if you ask him. If you have a kiddo that loves them as much as mine, stay tuned because I’m giving you the details on how you can quickly & easily put together a real DIY Monster Truck Arena in just a couple of hours!
First thing first, we need some monster trucks! Mattel makes some fantastic, great looking and durable monster trucks and accessories so we knew those would be our go-to buys. You won’t find these HOT WHEELS Monster Trucks costing upwards of $250,000 like the real ones, though. Simply head to your local Walmart store to find the entire HOT WHEELS Monster Truck collection.
HOT WHEELS has monster trucks of all sizes – small, medium, and large. All the monster trucks have wheels on a moving axis so the truck can maneuver & bounce like a real monster truck. The Monster Mover is a fun addition to carry all your monster trucks from the garage to the arena. Kids can load up to 12 small monster trucks to haul at one time. The top-level pops down for easy loading and fun unloading as trucks slide down the ramp into action.
When thinking about the monster truck arena we wanted to build, we thought about how a real monster truck can typically be 12′ tall by 12′ wide by 20′ long and more than 10,000 pounds but how small they look in the arena. The HOT WHEELS trucks are considerably smaller and lighter but we wanted their size to be appropriate to the arena size. We did some math and figured a 2.5×3′ arena would be great! It would give the monster trucks enough space to jump, fly, and crush everything while also allowing more than one monster truck in the arena like the Round 1 battles at the monster truck shows.
Now real monster trucks may only get 7 miles per gallon but your kiddo will get hours and hours of fun out of their HOT WHEELS Monster Trucks. Fun ones like Slinging Ink have “Rev Trendz” which means you can rev them up, let them go, and they’ll go the distance on their own!! We love racing him against the other trucks and yep, it even works in the arena on the sand!
DIY Monster Truck Arena
Supplies
4 – 2×4. Cut to the size you want
4 – 1×2. Cut to 22″
black spray paint like Rust-Oleum Universal
white marker or white paint
12 – popsicle sticks
hot glue
sheet of plywood
50lb bag of play sand
sander
table saw
Begin by cutting your 2×4 boards to the size you want. Make sure to keep in mind the additional inches you’re going to have on either side so the inside of your arena comes to the correct size you wanted. Our boards ended up being 2′ 5″ by 3′ 5″. We sanded them on all sides, then used 8 – 4″ wood screws to attach the four boards together – 2 on end of each board. At this point, be sure to paint the frame your color of choice. Next cut plywood to fit along the entire bottom of the frame then nail into place. We used a Ryobi AirStrike to put a nail in every inch or so into the arena frame.
To start the stadium light poles, we cut 4 1×2 boards to 22″, sanded them smooth, then spray painted them black using my favorite spray paint. You can see here that I put a few HOT WHEELS Monster Trucks in to see the scale and size of the trucks. We wanted to be sure the trucks had enough space to move around but still small enough to look realistic.
Drill one “pole” into each of the 4 corners of the arena.
For the actual lights, spray 12 popsicle sticks black on both sides, then draw 4 white circles using a white marker or white paint (I opted for the paint). Attach 3 sticks sideways along the top half of the 1×2 with hot glue.
Fill your arena with play sand to complete the look. In some areas pile more sand in to make hills and jumps for the trucks to fly over. I used a Cricut machine to make the Hot Wheels logo since it’s my son’s favorite. With the fun HOT WHEELS Monster Trucks from Mattel that we received, Ben has been having a blast and now practically lives in the garage so he can race his trucks
This quick and easy DIY Monster Truck arena can be completed in just a few hours. Your kids will have tons of fun racing their favorite HOT WHEELS Monster Trucks. You can even make scorecards and pit the racers against each other. Remember, you can find all of your kiddos favorite HOT WHEELS Monster Trucks at Walmart.
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