Building A Mechanical Toy, Part 1: Securing A Motor

Welcome to the first in a series of posts exploring basic, basic (did I say basic?) electronics and the building of a mechanical toy for and with my three-year-old daughter, Z. I've wanted to do a project like this for a while so that Z understands what's "under the hood" of her moving toys and so that we can creatively rework those that suck, a description I would apply to most mechanical toys I have seen.

I decided to post our work in stages as we go rather than as a finished how-to project so that (a) anyone who has also wanted to do this could experiment along with us, and (b) anyone who has already done this could help us overcome the obstacles we will likely face, or make creative suggestions along the way.

Z is strangely attached to the Bee Movie figure at left in the photo above. No, she hasn't seen the movie - she calls him "Andy Ant," after a favorite childhood book of mine we've passed down to her, this despite acknowledging that he is, in fact, a bee. He does a little bee dance, standing in place and wiggling his arms and body, when you wind him up, and I guess she thinks it's cute or something. But we both agreed that the bee at right, who swings his arms around, truly sucks. So we decided to take his motor out to make a new toy.

Most toys for small children use "tamper-proof" screws with triangular slots. They are not, in fact, tamper-proof. Just get a cheap set of precision screwdrivers and find one with a tip the length of a side of the triangle, then use a bit of extra muscle to dig deep and you'll get that screw out. This little guy had three - one on the back of his head, one between his wings, and one down by his rear. In five minutes I had extracted the motor, positioned his little arms and legs back in place, and closed him back up tightly.

Here's the motor. The winding key was held to the motor by the bee's body. You wind the motor by putting the key on that white wheel and cranking it, and power is transferred to pins on either side - one had previously powered each of the bee's arms. At this point, when you wind up the motor it dances frantically around on the table or floor, skipping over its various faces and rattling around. I know we have something good going here - Z already thinks this thing is waaaay better than the toy we ripped it out of. My hidden agenda is for us to have so much fun making this toy she'll soon think Andy Ant sucks, too, and she'll want to pull his guts out as well. We'll see.

In our next post, we'll examine the motor closely and compare it with a few tiny motors I bought, and we'll brainstorm some potential toy ideas.