When I was growing up, I dreamed of RC trucks pretty often. I’ve still got a bunch of magazines kicking around somewhere…

But, despite my desires, I never really had enough money for even the cheapest truck kit, the radio, the batteries, or a charger.

After begging for, literally, years, my mother decided it would be a fun project for me to work on for a summer and she helped me purchase a kit; an MRC Ironman. Maybe she figured it would take me a couple of months to put the thing together, and by that time, maybe my desires would shift and I’d be on to another hobby, as they still do to this day.

I completed the kit in about 2 days.

Well, time passed, I got my enjoyment out of it, and after a single stint at trying to sell it (and learning how NOT to sell things), it got put in the garage and forgotten about…

Well, by everyone except me!

Once it had lived it’s life out as a RC toy, I always had plans to turn it into something more… robotic!

Today!

Today I received a new nicad battery for the thing. $20 on Amazon, cheapest single amount I ever sunk into RC. I hooked it up to my old charger, scrounged 8x AA batteries from various crap around the house, wired everything up on the desk, and hit the throttle on the radio. All of the electronics still work! Dusty, but fine!

Then, as I started digging through parts bins to find some machine screws to mount the motor and install everything back into the truck, an important road block hit me:

I had tried - and failed - to improve this thing once before. With a makeshift rotary tool and a little elbow grease. In the process, I had low the correct spur gear for the only pinion I have.

So, despite all of this time, I still need to either find, or purchase yet another part for this thing before I can make it robotic.

But the good thing is, once I have the motor mount sorted, I’ll be able to ditch the battery hog radio, hook it up to a Spark.io with some custom firmware, and control this thing via a RESTful API endpoint.

For now, however, it’s going back under my desk…

The parts!:

The dusty parts!: