Car keys used to be simple metal objects, and you could fit a ring of them neatly in your pocket. Today, just about every car comes with a bulky key fob that’s chunky and just a little difficult to stuff in your jeans. One man has decided enough is enough. He’s slimming ’em down!
Meet Jeremy, the man behind RACECAR go brrr!, a business that made a name for itself selling custom switch panels. However, it’s also a great place to go for a slimline key fob conversion kit. Jeremy develops them himself, and sells his designs online for others looking to save some space on their keyring.
Jeremy found his way into this out of a desire for simple convenience. “Originally it was just because I was fed up with the massive fob on my own BRZ,” he says. He’d recently bought a 3D printer to mess around with, and figured out a smaller key fob enclosure would be a great starter project.
The basic concept is simple. The guts of a key fob usually contains a single printed circuit board with some buttons, and a small battery. Factory fobs are often designed to feel nice in the hand, with a certain heft and visual style expected from the customer. However, they’re rarely optimized for size. It’s quite simple to whip up a lightweight 3D-printed shell that does the same job without taking up nearly as much space.
As stated on the site, some sacrifices are required in the name of space. Jeremy’s enclosure dispenses with the physical key that the fobs include for accessing the vehicle when the battery is dead. The fobs also ditch the weather-sealing gasket and the silicone button interface layer. Instead, you’re pressing through the enclosure directly onto the tactile buttons on the PCB. It’s not a big deal, but it’s worth noting if you regularly like to throw your keys into puddles.
At first, the project was solely a personal one, but he realized it would surely appeal to others. “I was never happy with the print quality of the fobs until more recently when I got a new printer,” he says. “At that point I tossed them on my site to see if anyone else wanted one, and I’ve since sold a bunch of them.”
Things soon moved beyond the BRZ. “My girlfriend got her Supra, and asked me to do the same to her fob,” explains Jeremy. “She found the combination of her Subaru key and the Supra key was too much, and she didn’t like having both on the same key ring at the same time.” He spent the time to whip up a BMW-compatible enclosure, since that’s what the Supra uses, and now offers them on his site as well.
Jeremy’s designs only cover a very limited number of Subaru and BMW models, along with the modern Toyota Supra, but his work should serve as an inspiration to anyone else out there desiring a slimmer fob. There’s nothing stopping you from whipping up a design in some free CAD software, and printing out your own size-reduced fob enclosures. Indeed, this is the power of 3D printing, which democratizes the production of small custom plastic products.
It’s a neat project from Jeremy, and it’s even neater that he’s making these enclosures available to the broader public. Nobody should suffer with unsightly key bulges in their pants, especially as we’re coming up to the summer season.
Image credits: Racecar Go Brrr
Is that a fob in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?
I actually always liked the Subaru one,can’t say I ever struggled to transport it around..
Those are pretty big features to give up. Being stranded on a cold day because my fob battery died is not worth the tiny amount of convenience of having a smaller fob. Nor is killing an expensive fob because I accidentally dunked it or it just corroded because it spent too much time in proximity to my sweaty body during bike rides (I’ve killed multitools that way).
I hope solutions like this leads to manufacturers returning key fobs to a reasonable size. It’s my assertion that these giant key fobs are a driver behind some owners preferring to leave them inside their unlocked cars to tempt thieves rather than lug them around.
A good joke but there’s better.An insurance payout is better than what it’s worth as a trade
I’m 100% for this and if he starts making the blanks for Fords, I’m in.
The F56 Mini fob was ridiculously large. Great pains were made to make it round but there was no practical reason for it; all the circuity and buttons were in the center of the fob. When the F56 came out, someone 3D printed some new covers which allowed owners to take off the stupid round tumors so you could have a key that would actually fit in your pocket.
The Mini fob is obnoxious and it feels cheap. First thing I did when I got my SE was get a replacement metal cover that is both small and heavy enough to feel classy