Turntable Do-Over

Sometimes it’s hard to concede that perhaps one of your best ideas ever didn’t work. I had been fooling myself for about a week, and finally had to accept the fact that the turntable ends were not aligning perfectly. I believe the error crept in when I didn’t clamp the little tongues down to the […]

Tie Length

I picked up a package of bridge ties from Central Hobbies a little while back, thinking that they would be right for the turntable. When I got them home, I started wondering if they might be too short to allow for the crew to jump down and get to the ends of the turntable to […]

Turntable Bridge Core

If you’re thinking of following along and using my method to build your own turntable, may I recommend that you make friends with someone with a lathe instead. I’m sure the whole thing is much easier if you have decent tools. Making the bridge itself is probably a doddle if you have a lathe. I […]

Turntable Drive Module

The trickiest aspect of the drive module was fixing it to the bottom of the turntable without interfering with any of the frame members. Recall that the lazy susan base is actually too large to fit the originally-planned site, and I had to route away some of the benchwork frame members to accommodate it. They’re […]

Turntable Connections

This evening I added the two rails where I will feed power to the turntable. I rolled them using the FastTracks Rail Roller, and then soldered to the pads on the PC board I created some time ago. I also added the square tube, which provides a positive connection for the gearbox. Unfortunately, the wormgear […]

Gear fitting

Tonight I installed the gears for the turntable drive on their axles. Of course, I didn’t have my 2 mm axle material on hand, and so, I had to use 5/64″ material. This required a whole lot of reaming on the worm, from which my fingers may never recover. The ends of the axles are […]

Two Pieces of Brass

I’m always amazed at how slowly I make things out of brass. Tonight, for example, it took me an hour to cut two rectangles, solder them together and drill six holes through them (one not in quite the right place!). Then I spent a further hour scoring and bending them (again, one score is on […]

More excavation in the turntable pit

It turns out that the smallest nice lazy susan base that Lee Valley sells is still 9″ in diameter. That’s about 65′ in HO scale, or about 15′ bigger than my turntable. Unfortunately, I hadn’t thought this far ahead when making the original allowance for the pit, and so, I had carelessly made too small […]

Aligning the turntable pit

About the only machine tool I own is a little drill press. I bought it for $50 at a garage sale over a decade ago, and it has paid for itself many times over. Unfortunately, because my tools are not going to automatically align parts, I spend a lot of time figuring out how to trick […]

Driving the turntable – the plan

Sadly our guests just left, leaving us to ourselves and returning to progress on the turntable. I had decided that I need to sort out the drive system before going much further with construction. At first I thought I would get a worm gearbox from Lego. Unfortunately, they don’t have the right pieces on their […]