Power Wheels Power Tool Battery Upgrade

Brian Lough’s kids have a small battery-operated Power Wheels Jeep, which runs – or ran – on a 12V lead acid battery. While this was probably sufficient when it was first put into service, the original battery had degraded significantly. Rather than doing a simple battery replacement, Lough, with a bit of help from Bitluni, decided to swap it out for a 20V WORX power tool power unit.

The project involved using a 3D-printed adapter to hold the oddly-shaped battery, plus a hefty buck converter to drop the voltage from 20V down to 12V. The build process is outlined in the video below, including an interesting bit about how the power pack voltage didn’t register until they added a 10K resistor as a dummy load. From there, the process involved a bit of crimping, fiddling, testing, and hot glue to finish out this swap.

In the end, the device was successfully driven by Lough using a remote control unit, along with his girls actually riding in the vehicle. Although they were thrilled with the results of the swap, during the build they seemed to be anticipating an "exciting" failure.

This type of battery configuration would seem to have have several advantages, including the ability for quick change-out when one pack is depleted. More generally speaking, one might consider this type of battery pack to provide power in a wide variety of projects.