Time for a new steering system

My last post was about putting Bluetooth in a flea market toy car in order to control it remotely from my laptop. One problem I had with the car was the amount of current it drew. Unexpectedly, it turned out to be the steering that drew most of the current. I thought the steering was done by a servo motor, but apparently they put a regular DC motor in it to turn the weels. A piece of plastic stops the turning and basically the motor stalls everytime you steer, and so draws the maximum amount of power..

To reduce the power-demands of the car I cut out the steering DC motor (and all the plastic around it) and glued in a servo.

Now to make the servo turn the weels, I used some good old Lego bricks. The flat one with the dents is glued to the thing that used to make the weels turn. Than I used a gear wheel glued to (God, I love hot-glue!) the servo, which makes the flat brick move. Because the servo sometimes turns too much (it’s a cheap one so not always that accurate), I cut most dents from the gear wheel. This assures that no damage is done if the gear wheel turns too much..

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