Roundhouse doors may be too close for magnets

It’s been a rainy weekend here in Vancouver – at last! The kids and I spent a lazy afternoon raking through the Lego. They’re working on some very inventive cars, and I’m plugging away at mocking up the mechanism for the roundhouse doors. I foolishly went out into yesterday’s storm to get some magnets at Lee […]

Roundhouse pits should be oversize in baseboards

What was I thinking when I routed out the inspections pits in the baseboard? I made them just slightly over 4′ wide, which is the correct width. However, I left almost no space for a veneer of any sort. The result was that I was forced into making concrete pits with .010″ thick walls. Following […]

Forward at last: Pembroke turntable pit installed

One of the nice things about keeping a blog is that you can look back and see how long ago you started thinking you were at the point you are now. This stall with the turntable drive has been exactly a month, but last night I declared victory and installed the pit and drive in the […]

Driving roundhouse doors magnetically takes more metal than expected

I arrived home this evening to find the Boy had taken a stab at working up the roundhouse door mechanism in Lego. Like all the people on my team at work, he had very high-level instructions, and as with them, he exceeded my expectations. I’m sure there are more bevel gears in his collection, and […]

Turntable wheel drive looks successful

I think Mark Dance’s idea of driving this turntable with a wheel riding out near the edge of the table is going to work! Rather than dig into the Lego for real, I made my own wheel from some O-rings and brass and 1/2″ styrene tube. The 1/2″ wheel yields about nine turns for a […]

Another Idea for Roundhouse Doors

My friend Mark Dance has been coming up with all sorts of ideas for mechanisms for Pembroke lately. This week, he sketched an alternative mechanism for opening and closing the roundhouse doors. I’ve reproduced his sketch here, along with my usual ruminations. Mark’s idea is to use Lego bevel gears on a shaft that can […]

Lego Experiments Bear Fruit

Thanks to some encouragement from the followers of this blog, I gave Lego a shot for driving the turntable. We have a house full of the stuff, although one of our collectors likes mostly the Friends and Elves Lego, which is sadly not conducive to turntable manufacture. Fortunately, the Boy like Star Wars and Technic […]

Soft Pastels for a Fun Mockup

I’m a little exhausted by the whole turntable gear fiasco. So, I thought I would relax this evening by mocking up the roundhouse. I’m going to want a mockup to experiment with the doors, soon anyway, and I was originally thinking of only mocking up the front wall. However, I needed a break, and so, […]

How not to drive your turntable

To recap of where we are: The gears started spinning on their shafts because the shafts are round, and well, there is too much torque to overcome in the lazy susan. To overcome the spinning problem, I drilled and pinned the gears to their shafts. Then the whole mechanism had stiff spots, but kind of […]

Straight and even turntable ties

Here are the ties all Weldbonded to the turntable steelwork. I wonder how the real ones were affixed? For sure, they were as straight and even as the workers at the time could make them. To get mine evenly spaced and straight, I laid some double-sided tape on the cutting mat, along with a straight […]