Diamond Scale Turntable - rail powering

the pit rail and the arch may be a bit "iffy" for reliability. What do you think?< I have a MM table and use the pit rail and yes it is a bit "iffy". If I had it to do again I would use a hollow shaft and wipers on the shaft under the table. NYRS has some new reversing equipment but as mine is already installed haven't studied it much.

If you use a wiper on the pit rail rather than trusting to the wheels, the contact will be a lot better. The alternative is to replace the center pin with a piece of brass tubing and use that to carry the wires down to the bottom where you can do the two wipers down there. I'll note that replacing the wood with styrene really doesn't gain any strength as the styrene will warp more and will also take a set that wood won't. If you wan to make things strong, use steel or aluminum for the underneath parts that carry the real part of the turntahle. I'd also suggest that you do good solid switches underneath at each position with a switch for the CW and one for the CCW directions so that the turrntable can be precicesly indexed to each track. Then add in a motor driven pin to lock the turntable in place. When you do the receivers for the pins, do one first and then turn the turntable to the other direction and set it to the same position and lock down the receiver on the other side.

-- Why do penguins walk so far to get to their nesting grounds?

turntable directly< The NYRS controllers drive the table directly with a coupler. It's still possible to place a wiper before the coupler however.

You might look into a 1/4" stero plug and jack, if you can mount the plug to the end of the drive shaft.

steering wheel hub and horn ring comes to mind as a good source for the contact surfaces

We used a hollow shaft and a home brew slip ring assembly beneath the table to bring track power up to the bridge of the club turntable. We also used the NYRS stepper motor drive. It works quite well, alignment with the stall tracks is excellent, and given good track work in the roundhouse, you will be able to place locomotives into stalls without derailment. Our NYRS system does have one peculiarity. Occasionaly it "forgets" its programming and requires you to re accomplish the "teaching" procedure where in you set the table to each roundhouse stall track and tell the controller to remember the position of the stall. The NYRS stepper has logic to reverse bridge track polarity as required, so it is not necessary to use the traditional "split rail" power feed to accomplish this.

David Starr

Jim Trunzo wrote:

David:

Since the stepper motor direct couples to the shaft, I assume you drilled a hole through the side of the shaft to get the wires out? That is the approach I'm taking. Then I'll make up some sort of slip ring assembly.

I opted to use the Diamond Scale solid shaft and drill it to 1 1/4" depth, #28 drill, which gets you below the turntable floor. Then a 44 drill through.

Jim

Yes, that's what we did too. That

Good luck. A #28 drill going down 1.25" will not be easy to drill. I assume you have decent drill press?