I honestly can’t tell if watching this video is soothing or if it fills me with tension, as I’m pretty sure I’m feeling both. Watching someone rig a tiny power Ackermann steering setup with tweezers and slice layers off plastic parts so thin you worry he may set off a fission reaction is simultaneously awe-inspiring and nervy. Overall, it’s pretty incredible, though, so I say you just watch it.
Here’s the full video, where a tiny, tiny Toyota crown, 1.150th the size of a real one, is turned into a fully-functional remote-control car:
In case all the fingers and gigantic-looking tweezers and X-acto blades don’t give enough scale, I happen to have a little Toyopet 1:150 scale car that lives on my keyboard, so I could very clearly feel the minuscule scale of it all:
I don’t have a macro lens handy, so it’s a bit blurry, but that’s it next to a penny, to give some scale. This is all very, very tiny.
There are so many details in this video worth considering, Like this slicing process:
How is this guy so precise? Is he wearing a jeweler’s loupe?
He hand-made this whole steering setup, too. From tiny bits of metal that are the size of shavings and bits you’d sweep into a dustpan from other projects.
The chassis layout developed here is fantastic; it’s built much like a full-scale EV would be, with a low and centrally-mounted battery pack, though a modern EV’s power steering gear doesn’t need to take up the entire cabin. Those motors are cell phone vibration motors with their off-center weights removed.
Look at this tiny lathe he uses to turn the plastic wheel-and-tire into a little rim he can mount actual rubber tires on!
This is all amazing. The RC system uses an IR setup controlled by a little microcontroller, with a control unit made on a breadboard.
I sometimes have trouble threading needles, so this is all astounding to me.