Gallery, Projects and General > The Design Shop
Electric or Petrol Locomotive
Bernd:
Stew,
Good find. I should have remember Jan-Eric's articles in, believe it or not, Live Steam.
Bernd
bogstandard:
Nick,
I did a lot of research into drives a few years back, not for locos but for machinery. Mainly for driving a project I never got around to, a cam grinder.
The quick and easy way is what is now becoming the favoured transport about town. The electric buggy.
I picked up a new motor on ebay for £18, and if you want to do a quick and easy manual control, you can buy the throttle control gear as well.
If that is too large, I do have in my possession a very nice 'new' 550 sized industrial 24 volt motor with an all metal gearbox on it. The about 1/4" output shaft turns at around 160 rpm on 12 volts, and it would pull down a house if it was anchored down correctly.
Again I think somewhere I have exactly the same thing but based around the 380 sized motor.
It is a shame really as I gave away about 200 of these types of motors at last years Harrogate show to a model boat club, and they auctioned them off to make money for their dwindling club funds.
http://www.paddleducks.co.uk/smf/index.php?topic=3434.0
If you are interested in the gearbox motors, I will take a couple of piccies of them, so you can gauge the size, and if suitable, I will donate one to your project FOC.
BTW, I have a lot of experience over my years in model boating, and the sealed gel cells definitely come out tops, and if you wanted to 'radio' your loco, it could easily be done for under 100 squid for all the control gear. A good 12 volt battery and charger for the motor drive would be about another 40 squid.
John
NickG:
Thanks Stew, some good info there.
Bernd,
I was thinking more about this on Sat night. I also went back to the show on Sunday and got a few ideas and had a chat with a guy from a company that sells all the bits and pieces for electric locos.
Nothing really new came out of this except his advice to use gears rather than belts and use axle hung motors. I saw an example of that on a club stand and it looked really neat, compact and once done it never needs adjusting. Also caters for the fact that the wheels are sprung.
I picked up a couple of metal gears at the show but with hindsight the ratio isn't big enough, depends whether I can reduce the driving wheel size enough to increase the ratio. Also, I didn't think enough about the size of the gears and they aren't big enough to go with the 2 fan motors I had intended to use, so I may have to look into windscreen wiper motors, some of them are a smaller diameter.
My son has one of the ride on type 3 wheeler bikes, I remember looking at that and the motor is diminutive, as you say it's geared down a lot with plastic gears. I think due to the large wheel size on the childrens toys the ratios of these motors wouldn't be any good for a loco, I think it would be far too slow. Really I want something that is capable of 8mph but 6mph would be OK.
Might look into the lawn mower one again, I know somebody in our club has made something with some sort of innovative reversing gear! Will share when I find out more!
Thanks for your thoughts, good point about the hydraulic drive but it does sound quite complex, I want to keep this as quick and simple as possible!
John,
I had never thought about electric buggies. I will have a look! What does the 550 and 380 refer to? Just been doing some quick calcs and if the output is 160rpm, 3" dia. wheels would give a speed of around 5.7 mph if geared back up with a ratio of 4:1, or 7.6mph with 4" dia. wheels. Do you think it'd be possible to take the gearbox off and use the motor shaft? Anyway, thanks for the offer that's very kind and I'd be very grateful if you could take a couple of pics and I'll have a look.
I hadn't thought about radio control but in this case somebody would always be sat directly behind the engine to control it. It's the Pulse Width Modulation controller to control the speed of the motor that I really need to find out about now!
Many thanks all, am getting a lot of information helping me decide on some of the finer details here.
Nick
bogstandard:
Nick,
Before I forget, it is not adviseable to gear up in a hi torque situation, as yours is, it is ok if you are spinning up something like a grinding wheel, but not anything that has a heavy load involved. Either the motor will stall and most probably say goodbye and lose all it's smoke, or you will start to get teeth flying off the speed increase gears.
Now on to the motors.
These are 24 volt motors, except the buggy one which is rated for 18 volts, but they run very sweet on 12 to 30 volts, except the buggy one, which I don't know what it will handle.
The small and middle sized ones are commercial hi torque, very low drain motors. The 550 size will pull less than 200MA on full load at 12 volts. So if you had say a 7AH gel cell battery (size about 6"L x 4"H x 2"W), that could give you up to 35 hours continuous running on one charge.
This first one is a 380 size. On normal model car racing buggies they are usually 540 sized, this is about 2/3rds the size of a 540.
This is the one I talked about, the 550 sized. It is about 1/4" longer than a 540.
As you can see, the buggy one is rather larger at about 5" diameter.
I do have a rather large amount of gears I have collected over the years. The large metal ones, if memory serves me right, are just over 25mm in diameter. All the metal ones are much of a muchness and with the limited sizes I have give roughly a 3 to 1 reduction. The very high quality ones, still in their clusters, are off the 550 sized motor I showed you above. All would need re-hubbing or machining to get them to how you want them
If you can use any of the above, except of course the buggy motor, when I am able to get out of the house, I will pop them in the post to you.
Bogs
sbwhart:
John
Nick works for the same company as me but is based up in Newcastle upon Tyne, there,s quite a bit of toing and frowing of people so I could take them in, hand themover to somone wose going up to Newcastle job sorted.
Stew
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