Danny,
David Adams has several water tanks animated in the way you describe on his On3 railroad. He uses a stall motor underneath the layout driven through an assembly to raise and lower the spouts on his tanks. He also has a sound sample playing the sound of a water fill so the when you push the button the spout lowers and you hear the tender filling up.
The tank spouts in O scale have some heft. His system relies on the weight of the spout to drop down to the tender as the motor feeds out the cable. In HO you might have problems getting this to work due to the relative lightness of scale spouts. I have scratched some tanks in HO scale and gave up on the animation idea. Instead, I use the Tsunami water fill sound to simulate the fill without having the spout move.
BTW: I noticed your scratchbuilt thread of the gon. Nice to see on the forum..Water tanks are a fun scratchbuild project and the NG & SL Gazette has lots of scale drawings of narrow gauge tanks. I built a couple of tanks from their drawings. Here is a standard Gauge version of the Los Pinos tank from Gazette drawings:
.
Good luck with the project.
Guy
see stuff at: the Willoughby Line Site
I love Rube Goldberg contraptions like this!
Install a tortoise under the tank, arranged so the pin moves in a vertical plane. Then connect a vertical pushrod up through the tank frame to an extension at the back of the spout. Mechanical stops at the top and bottom of the vertical pushrod to control range of motion.
The fascia control would be a toggle or slide switch, thrown down to lower the spout, up to raise it.
(Hey. Maybe I should think about something like that for the swinging water cranes my prototype preferred...)
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
acgilbert No need to reinvent the wheel. Just follow AC Gilbert's method from 60 years ago on the American Flyer #596 Water Tank. Only need one button push, instead of two.
My first thought was to utilize one of those Christmas Tree ornament animation devices. The one I am thinking of hooks into a string of lights and just continually raises and lowers the ornament. Replace the ornament with the spout. Replace the string of lights with a 1.5 - 3 VAC power supply. Add a button. Push the button to begin the cycle and the spout lowers. When the spout is down let go of the button. Wait however long it takes to fill the tender then push the button to complete the cycle and raise the spout back up.
No need to reinvent the wheel. Just follow AC Gilbert's method from 60 years ago on the American Flyer #596 Water Tank. Only need one button push, instead of two.
With the servo you should be able to make that spout move real s - l - o - w.
Most animations I have seen move way too fast to look right. Things get even worse, when there is a slight "hitch in the git-along" .
The other day, I visited Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, and I am afraid, most animations they show do not thrill me at all! A cable car, which "bobs" along the cable, a ship, which floats on real water like a rubber duck in the bath tub, men raising beer glasses at a speed, that would empty them in an instant. Even their car system does not look right, as the cars turn around the corners without slowing down and come to an abrupt halt at the traffic lights.
Now I am not at all against animation on layouts, but they have to be applied sparingly and sensibly.
The Location: Forests of the Pacific Northwest, OregonThe Year: 1948The Scale: On30The Blog: http://bvlcorr.tumblr.com
Nice model I built it a few years back and it's waiting for a new home on the layout some days soon i hope.
An artful undertaking for sure and I guess anything can be done if one has enough skill and patients I was going to say I can't see the point in animating something like that as it would have been manually operated on the prototype, but! if you work in an engine crew figure standing on top of a tender and have the spout come down to him by parking the engine in a predetermined spot or maybe a figure on the ground working the chain etc. that would be really cool. Just throwing this thought out to you I would consider weighting the end of the spout some how so when you lower it by unreeling a spool I assume it will have a tendency to want to drop down instead of just hang there. I was thinking mechanical inside the tank and run a wire down to the decoder under the bench work but thinking about it mount everything under the surface this way all you need to do is run run a single cable wire up to a pulley for the spout. To make my live easier I wold build the entire thing on a sheet of what ever 1/4" plywood , Masonite what ever on you work bench so you can test it etc. and just plant the entire thing where you done and cover the seams with some ground cover.
Should definitely be a great build , please take lots of pics of the entire process.
What sort of animation are you planning on, as far as I know the only thing that moves or moved on a water tower was the boom and by all accounts as far as I can tell it was operated by hand by one of the engine crew by means of a counter weight. Sounds like an interesting project though.
Hi all,I have a HO scale JV Branchline water tank kit that I'm planning to animate, and I've considered two approaches:1) Conventional motor with a pulley and cut-off switches at each end of the travel. The primary advantage would be that I already have most of the parts that would be required. The disadvantage would be that the cut-off switches or the actuators for them would need to be on the outside of the water tank.2) Using a servo. I'm thinking of the singlet servo decoder from Tam Valley Depot - the kit form that can take a single pushbutton input. The advantage would be that the control circuitry is pretty much sorted. The downside is the expense and I'm not sure about how to handle the actual movement of the water spout.I'd prefer to put all the mechanical bits inside the water tank, but an under-the-table mechanism is an option. This is the first time I've tried any sort of mechanical animation. Has anyone done this type of thing before and if so, could you please share how you did it?Thanks in advance,
tbdanny
EDIT: Clarified 'water tower' to 'water tank'