Water Tower to get Noisy

After almost two weeks of avoiding manuals, while scanning blog posts and speed-watching the occasional tutorial, the speaker attached to the DF Player Mini attached to the ESP32 board burst into song! Along the way, I procured more bread boards because the ESP32 is too big to fit on a single one and allow connections […]

Water Spout and Sheaves

To get the water spout to pull the chain over the sheaves, I had to move its centre of balance away from the tank. To do so, I made the far end out of brass and the near end from acetal, which turns nicely in the lathe. The two parts fit together with a post […]

Water Tank Design Details

The water tank is beginning to take shape, at least in a virtual world. This will be a hybrid model – a mixture of 3D-printed and traditional parts, with perhaps a few more 3D-printed parts than are strictly necessary. The base, which interlocks with the mechanism beneath the baseboard, and a few test hoop connectors […]

Yes! It Failed!

Model railroad time for the past couple of weeks has gone toward learning to program the ESP32 that will drive the water tower’s functions. I found a good YouTube tutorial from Dave’s Garage that helped me get started with the typical blinking LED and a little serial port output. Then I found the stepper motor […]

The Pembroke Water Tower

Like the coal dock, we have precious little information about Pembroke’s water tower beyond a mention in the 1908 Grand Trunk Railway Bridges & Buildings book. Here we find that the town waterworks fed a 20,000 gallon tank that measured 13 feet by 12.5 feet in diameter. It had a 6″ drop pipe, a discharge […]