A locomotive turntable from a record player turntable, that is. TT for short from now on. And if Steven Ottes "one the cheap" topic has been of interest to you, all the better.
Wanted a TT here in this corner;
Didn't wanna have to crawl up on the benchwork to get to it, although it will hold my weight, so I cut out this section to work on it down in an easier position. My layout height is about 5 feet. I didn't have to cut any existing track or wires so it's not that invasive. Basic components, an old record player; And a cable reel with an I.D of about 12 inches I cut a small plywood base to build the setup on, to be attached to the layout when ready. The record player bearing was screwed to it, and a motor mount was fashioned out of a lever also from the record player too. That cable reel is too small for the TT pit, but I realized its I.D is fine for the ring rail step I.D, so some modification was needed. I cut and sliced and then milled the top surface flat. Then with material from the wide part of thje reel, I made the outer TT wall. It is too short of course, but I had enough scrap from it to make up the diff Adding a ring for the TT floor to sit on; More later... I made a capstan for this gearhead motor from some scrap stock in my stockpile.
Didn't wanna have to crawl up on the benchwork to get to it, although it will hold my weight, so I cut out this section to work on it down in an easier position. My layout height is about 5 feet.
I didn't have to cut any existing track or wires so it's not that invasive. Basic components, an old record player; And a cable reel with an I.D of about 12 inches I cut a small plywood base to build the setup on, to be attached to the layout when ready. The record player bearing was screwed to it, and a motor mount was fashioned out of a lever also from the record player too. That cable reel is too small for the TT pit, but I realized its I.D is fine for the ring rail step I.D, so some modification was needed. I cut and sliced and then milled the top surface flat. Then with material from the wide part of thje reel, I made the outer TT wall. It is too short of course, but I had enough scrap from it to make up the diff Adding a ring for the TT floor to sit on; More later... I made a capstan for this gearhead motor from some scrap stock in my stockpile.
I didn't have to cut any existing track or wires so it's not that invasive.
Basic components, an old record player;
And a cable reel with an I.D of about 12 inches I cut a small plywood base to build the setup on, to be attached to the layout when ready. The record player bearing was screwed to it, and a motor mount was fashioned out of a lever also from the record player too. That cable reel is too small for the TT pit, but I realized its I.D is fine for the ring rail step I.D, so some modification was needed. I cut and sliced and then milled the top surface flat. Then with material from the wide part of thje reel, I made the outer TT wall. It is too short of course, but I had enough scrap from it to make up the diff Adding a ring for the TT floor to sit on; More later... I made a capstan for this gearhead motor from some scrap stock in my stockpile.
And a cable reel with an I.D of about 12 inches
I cut a small plywood base to build the setup on, to be attached to the layout when ready. The record player bearing was screwed to it, and a motor mount was fashioned out of a lever also from the record player too. That cable reel is too small for the TT pit, but I realized its I.D is fine for the ring rail step I.D, so some modification was needed. I cut and sliced and then milled the top surface flat. Then with material from the wide part of thje reel, I made the outer TT wall. It is too short of course, but I had enough scrap from it to make up the diff Adding a ring for the TT floor to sit on; More later... I made a capstan for this gearhead motor from some scrap stock in my stockpile.
I cut a small plywood base to build the setup on, to be attached to the layout when ready. The record player bearing was screwed to it, and a motor mount was fashioned out of a lever also from the record player too.
That cable reel is too small for the TT pit, but I realized its I.D is fine for the ring rail step I.D, so some modification was needed. I cut and sliced and then milled the top surface flat. Then with material from the wide part of thje reel, I made the outer TT wall. It is too short of course, but I had enough scrap from it to make up the diff Adding a ring for the TT floor to sit on; More later... I made a capstan for this gearhead motor from some scrap stock in my stockpile.
That cable reel is too small for the TT pit, but I realized its I.D is fine for the ring rail step I.D, so some modification was needed. I cut and sliced and then milled the top surface flat. Then with material from the wide part of thje reel, I made the outer TT wall. It is too short of course, but I had enough scrap from it to make up the diff
Adding a ring for the TT floor to sit on; More later... I made a capstan for this gearhead motor from some scrap stock in my stockpile.
Adding a ring for the TT floor to sit on;
More later... I made a capstan for this gearhead motor from some scrap stock in my stockpile.
More later...
I made a capstan for this gearhead motor from some scrap stock in my stockpile.
Interesting project. Just make sure it's set on 33 and not 78
Modeling the Pennsylvania Railroad in N Scale.
www.prr-nscale.blogspot.com
The use of the record player bearing is an intersting idea in terms of keeping the table square as it rotates.
Disclaimer: This post may contain humor, sarcasm, and/or flatulence.
Michael Mornard
Bringing the North Woods to South Dakota!
Oops. One of my pictures misfired. This is the motor mount.
The gearhead is a Minimotor 900/1 gearhead, at about 4 volts it turns the table at 1 RPM. It turns against the ring originally driven by the record player's belt . Forgot to get a picture of it, but I will later.
Bayfield Transfer Railway The use of the record player bearing is an intersting idea in terms of keeping the table square as it rotates.
The turntale bridge is a piece of hardwood, the mount is a piece of acetal (Delrin) with a hole drilled through it's center. It fits snugly over the record player shaft, and is rigid enough that I don't think the ends of the bridge will need support.
This will be a continuing WIP, and I want to get the roundhouse built and detailed to a reasonable degree before putting it's big ol' panel back up on the benchwork frame.
And you will be playing your vinyl with what? A toothpick and a paper cone?
I've still got my AR turntable. And a few Audio Fidelity records.
And you, uh, don't.
Ed
Vinyl? Who plays vinyl? OK. I have a better turntable for that, actually. This one I'm using here was a garage sale snag YEARS ago. That motor mount pivots and there is a spring to keep tension on it, but if the table gets stalled, the motor simply slips. As you can see, no expense was spared on the adjustable tension spring mount.
I have to get some more track for the stalls. Nobody near by carries code 70, but I think my LHS can order it. The roundhouse will be made into 7 or 8 stalls.
Here are a couple progress pictures of this project.
Turntable as it stands right now:
And roundhouse so far: I use "eyeball" indexing, just stopping the TT at the desired stall or track. That works great as long as I have my glasses on! As I mentioned in the thread about Design Preservation Models, I don't like the Korber roundhouse. But I think I'll live with it anyway sinse most of what I don't like is will be hidden by a locomotive shop next to it. I don't recall the degree of angle from one stall to the next, but its less than most commercially available roundhouses, I think. The floor is styrene and sits about 1/32" below the rail heads inside the roundhouse. The track in each stall is electrically devided so 2 engines can occupy one stall if I choose to do so. That was mainly for use with diesels when I'm operating in post-steam-era mode. More later. Dan
And roundhouse so far:
I use "eyeball" indexing, just stopping the TT at the desired stall or track. That works great as long as I have my glasses on! As I mentioned in the thread about Design Preservation Models, I don't like the Korber roundhouse. But I think I'll live with it anyway sinse most of what I don't like is will be hidden by a locomotive shop next to it. I don't recall the degree of angle from one stall to the next, but its less than most commercially available roundhouses, I think. The floor is styrene and sits about 1/32" below the rail heads inside the roundhouse. The track in each stall is electrically devided so 2 engines can occupy one stall if I choose to do so. That was mainly for use with diesels when I'm operating in post-steam-era mode. More later. Dan
I use "eyeball" indexing, just stopping the TT at the desired stall or track. That works great as long as I have my glasses on!
As I mentioned in the thread about Design Preservation Models, I don't like the Korber roundhouse. But I think I'll live with it anyway sinse most of what I don't like is will be hidden by a locomotive shop next to it.
I don't recall the degree of angle from one stall to the next, but its less than most commercially available roundhouses, I think. The floor is styrene and sits about 1/32" below the rail heads inside the roundhouse. The track in each stall is electrically devided so 2 engines can occupy one stall if I choose to do so. That was mainly for use with diesels when I'm operating in post-steam-era mode.
More later. Dan
Well, the first thing I noticed when I opened up the kit, there is a sag along the top edge on the left wall. No way to correct it, either live with it, hide it, or toss it. The window pane spacing on those great big roundhouse windows is about O scale. Too distracting, I won't use them. The template for building the internal framing doesn't match the angles of the brick walls. (That, I can compensate for easily enough) One thing that really bugged me was the doors on the box art have what I thought were really neat looking windows in them. Inside the box, the doors are solid. Maybe that's not a big deal, but it added to the frusteration, just another obvious compromise.
No fault of the kit, since I changed the angle of the stalls, I knew I couldn't use the rear wall castings or the door opening castings. I was ready for that. Figured I could work them into another project. But with O scale windows?
I well know that "cottage industry"multi material kits will be more difficult than injection molded kits, sure. Correcting fit and finish I expect, but when I find myself looking for alternatives to every piece in a kit to improve it or make it acceptable? Or hiding the incorrectable flaws? Rather defeats the purpose of the kit, which could and would have been a crowning touch on the layout.
Interesting use of a junk turntable. I wonder if a direct drive unit would work just as well? I like that idea because it generally is driven by a gear on the outer edge, lending a little more support than a belt drive that is supporte only by the spindle.
The only down side to your design that I can see is that this is supported by the center spindle, and some locos can weigh quite a bit. If it were me, I probably would add a rubber wheel or slide guide of some kind to support the outer edge of the turntable beneath it.
7j43k And you will be playing your vinyl with what? A toothpick and a paper cone? I've still got my AR turntable. And a few Audio Fidelity records. And you, uh, don't. Ed
Hey, I feel you there, I have about 500 vinyl albums, and buy more every year (usually 5-6 or so.) New stuff is usually the vinyl plus a digital download code for the price of a little more than a CD - pretty good deal if you ask me for that nice big album art, and usually there's posters or something inside as well.
Julian
Modeling Pre-WP merger UP (1974-81)
I got this record player turntable at a garage sale, I never used it for records. The way the model turntable mounts to the platter is so rigid, even my heaviest locos don't tip it downward on the ends. I actually wondered about that, but not a problem.
As far as how you drive a RR turntable, whatever you use, you just have to be able to stop it precisely where it needs to. I'm not using any of the record player's drive components. I use a slow motor-gearhead unit.
GP-9_Man11786 Interesting project. Just make sure it's set on 33 and not 78
-Bob
Life is what happens while you are making other plans!
Darn, and in cleaning out my Mom's house I just threw out my old turntable, a pretty decent Technics one I had in college. Great write up. I too plan on using the old Mark 1 eyeball indexer - I am planning for the turntable and roundhouse to be fairly front and center and easily visible to the operator, like one we have on the club layout which is controlled by an old Dc walkaround throttle of some sort. It's right up in your face so it's easy to just visually line tracks with no complex or expensive indexing mechanism.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
LION thunked of tuntable turntable. Now him thunks better. (Not that layout of LION calls for a turntable, but ewe can try it if you want.
Open up an old hard drive. You will need small TORX drivers to do this. dig deep into it. LION saves the magnets because they are useful. LION saves the platters because they are pretty, and because then theifs (nor the FBI) can recover the dats. Then down at the bottom is the motor. Avery precision motor. At 5 volts it will turn 7000 rpm, which may be a tad faster that the requirements of your turn table. No matter, you will not use the motor as a motor, but only as the pivot for your turntable. Securely mount the base to the layout, attach the bridge to the turny-part, and devise whatever sort of slow motion drive you like.
Should work real good. And besides you can stack all of those pretty platters on your desk.
ROAR
The Route of the Broadway Lion The Largest Subway Layout in North Dakota.
Here there be cats. LIONS with CAMERAS
The thing to do to reuse the shiny hard drive platters is to make clocks out of them.
If you are careful in opening one up, you can connect it to a power supply and it will still spin witht he cover off. You can let a small screwdriver drag on the platter (don't press down, the motor has very little torque) and scrap the magnetic material off - THEN the data is truly not recoverable. Unless you physically damage the platters, there actually are ways to recover usable data from them.
I'm less sure of the hard drive bearing being able to take the off axis force of a heavy loco running on and off the table. Even more so than a record turntable, they aren;t meant to take much side load. A record turntable, at least a decent one, generally has a very heavy platter to dampen vibrations which would distort the sound. A hard drive might be good for N or Z scale though.
I like your inventiveness and use of a turntable that would otherwise have possibly be tossed into the trash. Yes, I do still play vinyl records on an old turntable. Operating model railroad turntables can be expensive. Thanks for posting it .
Here's an update. And a little serving of "crow" to myself. Not liking the roundhouse as discussed earlier, I decided to scratchbuild one. Searching hundreds of photos, I came to realize there are so many ways to build one, combining wood and brick, steel and brick, steel and wood, doors...no doors, big or little windows, it's endless.
Sitting on the couch next to my wife I muttered, "Theres no rules with roundhouses" explaining the above. So she said: Then, why can't you use the one you have?
Now if THAT didn't make me feel stupid! I mean, DUHHHH! Theres gotta be a way to use what is good enough, and change up the rest.
So with a few mods, it's back in the picture. I'm only using the sides since I changed all the geometry, fronts and backs won't work.
Stick built framing following template in kit, but with my own cut "lumber":
Overview of shop area. The 2 track plywood floor beside the roundhouse is the foot print for the diesel shop, probably a metal structure. A better view of the planned diesel shop area: This one frame section and floor are removable should I ever need to access the soldered terminals. The rear walls of the roundhouse are masonite, turned rough side out. I'm not going to spend any time on detailing something that will never be seen once the structure is in place. Oh, The roundhouse and diesel shop are both easily removable by the way, since working on the details up there on the layout would be pretty difficult. There are computer type plugs that come up under the floors to connect the wired connections quick and easy. For what it's worth, those slotted masonite backdrop panels are going to be replaced with seamless sheetrock ones that go all the way up to the ceiling eventually, before the real scenicking takes place.
Overview of shop area. The 2 track plywood floor beside the roundhouse is the foot print for the diesel shop, probably a metal structure.
A better view of the planned diesel shop area: This one frame section and floor are removable should I ever need to access the soldered terminals. The rear walls of the roundhouse are masonite, turned rough side out. I'm not going to spend any time on detailing something that will never be seen once the structure is in place. Oh, The roundhouse and diesel shop are both easily removable by the way, since working on the details up there on the layout would be pretty difficult. There are computer type plugs that come up under the floors to connect the wired connections quick and easy. For what it's worth, those slotted masonite backdrop panels are going to be replaced with seamless sheetrock ones that go all the way up to the ceiling eventually, before the real scenicking takes place.
A better view of the planned diesel shop area:
This one frame section and floor are removable should I ever need to access the soldered terminals. The rear walls of the roundhouse are masonite, turned rough side out. I'm not going to spend any time on detailing something that will never be seen once the structure is in place. Oh, The roundhouse and diesel shop are both easily removable by the way, since working on the details up there on the layout would be pretty difficult. There are computer type plugs that come up under the floors to connect the wired connections quick and easy. For what it's worth, those slotted masonite backdrop panels are going to be replaced with seamless sheetrock ones that go all the way up to the ceiling eventually, before the real scenicking takes place.
This one frame section and floor are removable should I ever need to access the soldered terminals.
The rear walls of the roundhouse are masonite, turned rough side out. I'm not going to spend any time on detailing something that will never be seen once the structure is in place. Oh, The roundhouse and diesel shop are both easily removable by the way, since working on the details up there on the layout would be pretty difficult. There are computer type plugs that come up under the floors to connect the wired connections quick and easy. For what it's worth, those slotted masonite backdrop panels are going to be replaced with seamless sheetrock ones that go all the way up to the ceiling eventually, before the real scenicking takes place.
The rear walls of the roundhouse are masonite, turned rough side out. I'm not going to spend any time on detailing something that will never be seen once the structure is in place. Oh, The roundhouse and diesel shop are both easily removable by the way, since working on the details up there on the layout would be pretty difficult. There are computer type plugs that come up under the floors to connect the wired connections quick and easy.
For what it's worth, those slotted masonite backdrop panels are going to be replaced with seamless sheetrock ones that go all the way up to the ceiling eventually, before the real scenicking takes place.