Li'l tiny motors

Electronic Goldmine, one of my absolute favorite places to buy such things, has a great selection of them. Not a one of them is over $1.29US and all are new. No desoldering required.

Are you incredibly stupid as well as an asshole, or just playing obtuse on purpose? No one would have complained if you posted a reference to an interesting or cheap source of electrical or scratchbuilding parts.

But you persist in continual messages abou individual items you are selling on eBay. We all know where to find eBay if we want. We might not know and might not find goldmine or other sources, so sharing info with NO PART PLAYED BY PERSONAL GAIN is appreciated. Your selfishness is not. FOAD.

I don't usually reply to spammers, but you've raised my hackles:

a) although most people will ignore notices of e-Bay auctions, some people are annoyed, because this is a discussion group, not an advertising group. If you have some useful information about model trains or toy trains, post it. For example, you may have found an easy way to get rid of rust on old AF tracks.

b) if people want to know about e-Bay auctions, they go to e-Bay. So your posts informing about stuff you have on e-Bay are utterly pointless.

c) you top-post, which indicates that you don't in fact read to the end of whatever scribblings you are responding to.

d) you've used the same verbiage in several "answers" to posts.

e) This particular post about li'l tiny motors provided useful information, about a surprising place to find these critters, and the follow-ups provided more, about a commercial source for them. Not provided, please note, by that source, but by someone who has used that source for all kinds of useful Stuff.

Bye, bye.

On 12/29/2007 3:03 AM Ray Haddad spake thus:

Yeah, I figured there was a way to get these little buggers without having to cannibalize consumer units. Sure enough,

So what ideas do folks have for using these? I was thinking they're

You can get these in a number of ways: - Like you discovered, any junked phone or pager with a vibrate feature has one. The problem is they have an offset weight (hopefully) glued or (sadly, more likely) welded to the output shaft that makes them wobble under power. If you can get it off, you're all set, but it's easy to trash the motor while trying to do it.

- Microrobot places like solarbotics.com sell them in a clean form, for example

- If you can find a radio s*it store that still sells zip-zap cars, they are powered by these motors, and you'll also have a nice selection of gear work, mounts, and even a neat controller you can salvage. *

"flea" unit, like those powered trucks< Problem is these motors have no torque so powered trucks wouldn't work. Also they would need a way to be geared down which would be a lot of work. So they would be useful for anything that would work at the rpm they have and didn't require torque.

I've seen one of these in a scratch built Nn3 Shay also had sound!! WOW!! Way/Whey/Weigh cool. I've seen this a couple of GATS (or whatever they are calling themselves now) shows. I can't remember the name of the modular group he belongs to.

These things are almost as common as dirt:

Paul N.

It's going to need a very large gear reduction before it will do anything useful and (multiple) worm/pinion reductions are inefficient enough to use up all the available torque. One could use multiple stage spur gear reduction between 2 or 3 shafts but that's going to be a lot of very fine gears! Perhaps it could drive Diesel loco fans with a rubber belt drive - I'm a steam loco man.

HO workman with pneumatic drill miniscene?

Greg.P.