The Smallest Hand-Made RC Car You’ve Ever Seen

RC cars are still popular, but building them today tends to be fairly trivial. You can easily purchase all of the parts you need online and simply bolt them together to make a nice RC car. To stand out from the crowd, you need to do something a bit more custom. There are a lot of ways to go about that, but YouTuber Diorama11 seems to enjoy focusing on miniaturization in particular. In their latest video, they built a completely functional 1:150 scale RC car complete with working steering.

At 1:150 scale, the entire vehicle can rest comfortably on your finger. But, despite that small size, this RC car contains two motors and all of the electronic components necessary to drive around. The shell of the car, which appears to modeled after a 12th generation Toyota Crown (a model that was never sold in North America), was purchased. Everything else was meticulously handcrafted, including the mechanical parts and electronics. Diorama11’s video shows each step of that process, and the craftsmanship is something to behold.

They started by building the steering rack for the front wheels. The only parts they used from the original model where the wheels, and even those were shaved down to just the rims so that actual rubber tires could be mounted. That steering rack was attached to the car’s chassis platform and is actuated by a tiny DC motor via a worm gear. A second motor powers the drive wheels. The motors are controlled by an ATtiny1616 microcontroller through a small motor driver IC. Those are paired with a small LiPo battery and RC receiver. Diorama11 even went the extra mile and built a custom RC transmitter. This RC car probably won’t be winning any races, but it is a marvel of miniaturization and craftsmanship at small scales.