On Using Scale Spikes

By the time I had finished spiking the ties to the turntable, I had learned a few more things about spiking. So, I thought I would write them down in my book for future reference. These are, of course, the excellent scale spikes available from the Proto:87 Stores. It sounds ridiculous to use scale spikes, […]

Choices for manual turntable control

I got down to ReStore today to search for some options for turntable controls. This place is like an extended basement – boxes of stuff that people have saved from their renovations and donated. You can’t expect to find exactly what you need, but if you’re flexible, you might find something that will work for […]

Testing the turntable

This evening, I successfully turned and parked the locomotive using the turntable. There are still some kinks to work out around driving the pin and turning the turntable from the fascia, but I can definitely see the light at the end of the tunnel!

Test fitting the turntable

Before I go and invest time in detailing the turntable, I thought I’d better do a test run. I’m glad I did, because as usual, it was two steps forward and one step back. I had the drive wheel assembled, and was blithely rotating the turntable when I came up against something hard. Hmm. That […]

Learning from a Master – Brian Pate’s KMR

Brian Pate is a master model railroader. Surprisingly he doesn’t have the designation from the NMRA, but nobody who knows him would argue that he is otherwise. I believe he is perhaps the only person to have won the gold award at two national NMRA conventions. So, when we learned that he and his wife […]

Turntable wiring made simple

Turntables obviously need to reverse polarity of their rails. In the bad old days, people used to use all sorts of tricks to switch the polarity. One could use a split ring rail and opposing wipers, or a manual switch with DCC, but in either case, the engine sound will cut out briefly. It’s much […]

Turntable locks

Tonight I redid the lock sockets on the turntable, and this time they seem to work much better. Before starting, however, I had to get the turntable itself more firmly fixed to the lazy susan base. To accomplish this, I took the big risk of disassembling everything. Recall that the lazy susan has to be […]

Another turntable alignment mystery

It was going great! I was confidently soldering socket after socket onto the lazy Susan, using a temporary pin to align them with the fixed tube. It was going so well, in fact, that I thought I might get on to soldering up the electrical connections tonight. Well, not so fast. When I had soldered […]

Turntable locks do-over

As I was congratulating myself on a job well done the other night, I had a terrible thought: what if the lock sockets don’t clear the drive wheel as they’re rotating around the far side of the turntable? I quickly got out a green Fineliner and propped it into a corner of the square hole […]

Pretty precise parts to lock turntable

To make the sockets and guide that enable the alignment pin to lock the turntable in each of the six positions, I fashioned a crude little mitre box from a piece of maple. Starting with a sacrifice socket, I figured out the correct length and angle, and cut that angle into the block of maple. […]