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 […]

Gears Kind of Work

I wrote two weeks ago about the difficulty with getting the gears driving this turntable to stay on the shafts without rotating. Thanks to all of you who responded with suggestions. Ultimately, I decided to try pinning the gears to the shafts. I drilled through the gear collars and glued tiny pieces of .014″ wire […]

A little silliness

The train room has been acting as a guest room for the past two weeks, making progress slower even than normal. I sadly bid adieu to my mum yesterday, but that means that I could spend a few minutes today getting back to business. And what business did I get up to, pray tell? All […]

A New Theme?

I’m trying out a new WordPress Theme. Somehow I think I should be able to make a big rich homepage, encouraging readers to dig into some featured articles. So far I haven’t got it tuned quite the way I would like; what do you think so far?

A Return to the Turntable Drive

A while back I wrote about the gearbox for driving the turntable. This is based on some readily available gears from Tamiya. Unfortunately, the Tamiya gears don’t seem to be made for the torque required to drive my mechanism. This is surprising, because it doesn’t feel like a lot of torque, but when you go […]

Filling in the pit

My mum is coming to visit tomorrow (!), and so, I wanted to get as much turntable work done as possible before the train room turns into a bedroom. Ideally I would have liked to have had the turntable mounted in the benchwork before she got here, but unfortunately, I didn’t quite complete that. I […]

Stock Storage

I’ve been meaning to write this up for years, and a recent thread over at Model Railroad Hobbyist has encouraged me to finally post something on the topic. If you’re reading this blog, you probably have a collection of long narrow packages of strip styrene, scale lumber, maybe some brass wire and tube and so […]

Finish layer on turntable steelwork

It was time to re-acquaint myself with my airbrush and other painting equipment. Frankly, I approach airbrushing with the same trepidation that most people feel for soldering, perhaps even public speaking. There is a lot on the line every time you get it out. First of all, there is a largely-complete model, on which I […]

More Thoughts on Roundhouse Doors

I’ve been pondering the roundhouse doors for a couple of days. Earlier this year, I came up with the idea to drive the doors with magnets beneath the layout. However, the tangle of rods and levers beneath the baseboard was hard to visualize. So today, I thought I would sketch it out. It still […]