I just saw a listing on a swap forum for five motors harvested from Blue Box diesels. Flywheels included, of course. There's surely got to be a lot of this older technology lying around.
It set my mind to recalling the ingenuity of many model railroaders. And I'm wondering what uses have been or can be made for motors that have been replaced by more advanced power. Turntables? Anything else?
John (of Attu)
I suppose you could make a little fan to help paint dry while you watch it.
It took a while, but I generally trash stuff like that. When I moved to Delaware, I tossed a lot of train junk I'd never use and it was just taking up space.
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.
Probably any type of rotational animation, think windmills, fairground rides, etc. You'd probably want to do some testing to see how smoothly they turn at low RPMs, and decide if the performance is acceptable or it would be better to run them at a higher RPM and gear down the output.
For a turntable, you'd have to make sure the motor had enough torque and that it can be controlled well enough to repeatedly come to a stop at the desired point.
My old Atlas deck turntables still run and I think the motors are the same ones Athearn uses for old BB engines. They are geared down using a big flat gear and a worm drive. They are, incidentally, as noisy as one of those bad music "artists" people have been complaining about.
Could you run a switch with one? My switches aren't motorized yet but I have a lot of spare motors.