I was wondering if it was possible to simply solder a wire to the potentiometer in a servo and read the position through analog in, or would i need to do something more complicated than that?
Anyone?
Well if no one has a answer ill try it myself... just have to wait for my new servo's to arrive, so i can butcher one of the old ones 
That should work, give it a try.
Hi! I'm planning to do the same so I've been doing some research on it. There are some walkthroughs available on the matter. Try to google "modify+servo+feedback". In particular this one is pretty good:
It's pretty easy actually. Basically you just attach a wire to the wiper of the pot and one to it's ground. I'm not even sure the ground one is necesary?. Here is a quote from the page:
it will work with only 1 ground. The second one is to help prevent ground loops and it makes the servo a bit more flexible on how it can be connected
Not sure what he means by flexible (?) however someone else told me that ground loops were rather unlikely BUT that the extra ground might give more precise readings...
Let me know how it goes...in particular if you try it without the extra ground...Having 4 wires from every servo would be easier than 5...
Aniss
there is a specific reason for the 4th wire but it only applies for certain applications where you want to manually adjust the position of a servo when it is not connected.
-This mainly applies to humanoid robots where you disconnect the servo power so you can freely move the servos while the robot is on to pose it. They need to get readings for each pot but if they disconnect the servo plug physically then they need the extra ground to get the readings.
Hmm..just to make it clear...
A servo has 3 wires normally. The 4th would be the one wired to the wiper of the pot. The 5th would be the redundant ground wire, which may or may not be necesary?!
So, clifdweller, is it correctly understood that you ONLY need the 5th (the redundant ground wire) if you wish to read the pot while the servo is disconnected? Otherwise it has no purpose whatsoever?
No, the extra ground wire may be useful because there could be noise generated by the motor current flowing through the existing ground wire. Connecting a separate ground could reduce noise on the analog input readings. A search on ground loops should turn up more on this if you are interested.
But try it with four wires and see if the readings are ok.