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 […]

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 […]