*added pics* Bringing new life to a childhood toy

I got an RC car about ten years ago. It was pretty entertaining for a little while, but there seemed to be a lot more charging and worrying about running into things than driving it and having fun.

I also didn't know nearly as much about batteries as I do today... :naughty:

It's a Nikko car with a Nikko batt pack: 4AA NiCad, 4.8V, 0.6Ah, shrink-wrapped together with an RC connector. 'Bah,' I thought, 'this isn't nearly as impressive as it looked a decade ago!' I got a 1x4 (as opposed to 2x2) AA battery carrier and four Sanyo 2.5Ah AA NiMHs yesterday afternoon, and perhaps today I'll attach a 9V snap lead to the carrier, remove the connector from the old pack and solder it to the new one.

When (if) it works, I'll have an RC car with roughly quadruple the runtime of the original, no memory effect, and 15-minute charges.

Amazingly enough, this exact pack is still being made! When I went to Fry's to get the battery carrier and cells, I first checked out the RC packs they had available, and they had the familiar old blue NiCad pack with the same old dumb charger. The only difference was an advertised 620mAh instead of 600. Absolutely amazing.

Re: Bringing new life to a childhood toy

I'm glad I put that "(if)" in there. It almost didn't fit. :sweat:

It took quite a weight loss program with the Dremel to get the battery carrier in, as the carrier is apparently much bigger than the bare cells. The handy part now is that I only took off just enough for the carrier to squeeze in there, so it's pretty solid, and I can just remove the AAs for recharging.

I used my Helping Hands for the first time to solder the 9V snap leads to the clipped and stripped ends of the old pack's connector leads. It was much easier than doing it freehand, allowing me to concentrate on the soldering itself instead of on simply holding everything up.

Here's the car:


Here's the battery compartment:


After a minute or so of hiccups, the car runs as smoothly as it did when I got it.

Hay, i had that same car when i was like 6...so 8 years ago! got it for christmas one year! i broke it before new years of that year probably :laughing: ...anyway, good job man!

need some headlights in there!!