Radio-controlled cars and trucks can provide endless hours of fun. They come in all shapes and sizes (and price ranges), but a new YouTube video demonstrates how you can make one at home with the tiniest of vehicles. The video shows a Tomy Tec 1/150-scale Mitsubishi Fuso semi-truck being turned into a homemade RC car.
The build begins by taking apart the truck. The cab and interior come out before the plastic axles are slipped off and replaced with metal ones. The plastic front tires are ground down and replaced with a rubber O-ring. The tiny truck cab houses the drive motor, battery, and steering mechanism made of little aluminum plates.
The trailer also gets an upgrade that you can’t see. The covered cargo carrier houses a control board and an even larger battery. Thin, delicate wires crisscross inside the rig, connecting the microcontroller with the rest of the electronics. Underneath the truck cab is the charge port and an indicator light showing the battery’s status, which is a neat feature.
Another modification made to the truck turned the artificial lights into real ones. The builder replaced the stand-in units with working LEDs, including the cab and trailer lights. Even the turn signals work, adding a bit of realism to the tiny build.
While the Tomy Tec truck is a tiny RC car, it’s not the tiniest one ever produced. According to Guinness Book of World Records, the smallest RC car ever measured 25 millimeters (0.98 inches) long. It was a 1/90 scale Smart car, which featured a battery with about 15 minutes of operation time from a full charge.
The video ends with a demonstration, the Mitsubishi driving forward and backward with ease, and the whirl of the tiny electric motor sounds a bit like the clicking of a diesel engine. It’s great to see an endless supply of creativity in the automotive community outside of the makes and models rolling off the assembly line. Enthusiasm for cars is everywhere.
