18V Drill Battery BLEW UP THEIR POWER WHEELS!

Converting a Power Wheels ride-on toy to run on an 18volt lithium ion drill battery SHOULD be an easy DIY project that you can knock out in just a few minutes. But in our case it turned out to be much more difficult with (somewhat) catastrophic results. We show you how it should be done and something that you might run in to if you tackle this project yourself. Watch until the end and see if you can offer some advice – I’d love to hear it!

Our kids love their Power Wheels truck but let’s be honest for a second: those batteries are absolute garbage. They take forever to charge and if you ever leave them on the charger too long just go ahead and throw them in the trash (please do not throw lead acid batteries in the trash). The good news is that there’s a solution. Since many of us DIYers have a stack of 18V drill batteries we can delete the battery on the Power Wheels and wire in an adapter that accepts drill batteries, which have longer run-times, better chargers, and you can swap them in and out quickly so the kids can play much longer.

You can even do this conversion on an old machine, like we did with this Barbie Jeep that hasn’t run in no telling how long and didn’t even have a battery!

The process is very simple. Identify the positive and negative leads coming from the battery, wire in the new adapter positive-to-positive and negative-to-negative, and let ‘er rip. We added a 30A inline fuse to protect the motors. As you can tell from the video the kids are super happy.

★ In-line fuse: https://amzn.to/3sDwDrR
★ Dewalt drill battery adapter: https://amzn.to/3MkJTt7
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Converting my truck to run on a drill battery actually turned out to be more complicated that it should have been. After we deleted the battery and wired up the new drill battery adapter the truck only had one gear (hi-forward); lo-forward and reverse didn’t work. I let the kids drive around the yard and before they even made one lap the truck started smoking and it was apparent I fried at least one of the motors. However, after a preliminary lookover I can’t figure out exactly why that happened, especially since the Barbie Jeep was so simple (as was expected). If this is something you think you could help with, drop me a comment below – I’d love to hear your perspective.

If you enjoyed this video please consider subscribing to the channel! In the future we’ll be “restoring” the Barbie Jeep for my daughter and we’ll get that dump truck up and running again, too. We do a lot on our farm and we have a lot of fun in the process – we’d love to have you along!
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