Maybe a plastic tube from the fly wheels?
NICE!
You could proportionally adjust the fan speed by bending the blades of the “master” fan.
Ed
Yep, You could probably use an etched brass radiator fan for the motor fan. Drill a mounting hole in it and bend the blades a bit more for more air flow. (sell it as a decoder cooler!)
A tube would have to be pretty big to more a sufficient volume of air. The fan probably wouldn’t produce enough pressure to make that practical.
If both the fan and aux motor were mounted to a brass strip or angle, you could use a pair of pulleys and a suitable rubber band or O-ring for the drive belt. Could also work for multiples by using multi groove pulleys as needed. A decoder with an extra circuit could activate the aux motor. Would it draw too much from the rest and need a relay or seperate pick-ups for power? Most of the Alcos’ seem to be engine driven through a gearbox and shafting and would therefore be engine RPM dependant. Are later fans electric on 1:1 scale diesels? Whaddaya think? J.R.
here’s what I was thinking of using:
I’ve tried the little motor out and it seems to have plenty of torque. Using the gearing from the car, the motor would have to be vertical, but if I could find the right gears to turn the motor horizontal, then the whole thing would only occupy about 5/16" or 3/8" height at the top of the shell.
(sorry about the huge pics, I’m still having trouble posting photos on the “new” site)
It would be sweet if the speed could be controlled by the sound circuit, regardless of the loco speed, i.e.: speed the fan up when the sound is accellerating, slow it back down (idling) when the loco is at speed, etc. Untill that’s possible, I would be happy with the fan running at idle.
a SW1500 would be an excellent model for this type of setup, cause the fan is vertical and can be run off the driveshaft
Jay,Remember a locomotive has 1-4 fans…So,IF each fan is powered a locomotive will need a motor for each fan unless the fans could be hook in series and operated from one motor…
As others have said, it would be hard to see the small EMD fans anyway, unless you redo all fans with Cannon ultra fine fan grills, my objective is to do this with an ALCo with it’s large fan blade. But to answer you, these little motors draw such a small amount of current, you could probably hook up 5 of them, or with pullies you could split it up, with one motor for the dynamic brake fans and one for the cooling fans.
I’m going to rig up some kind of test apparatus with some pulleys and gears from some old cassette players I’ve still got stashed away this weekend.and see what I come up with.
Jay,EMD also uses 48" cooling fans…Those are rather large.
How powerful are those motors? The first thing I thought of when viewing modelmaker51’s pics was using the things as “traction” motors in diesel models. This would leave the carbodies empty for DCC/sound installations and such. Which reminds me. Anyone remember the PFM “SPUD” power truck? Does anyone make anything like the SPUD today?
My guess is that the motors aren’t powerful enough for locomotive applications except for something like maybe a 44 or 70 tonner or use in an RDC or “Doodlebug” where there isn’t likely to be a trailing load.
Andre
Jay,
From the size of the motor in the pic this should be doable. I’m not sure you can get a gear set to drop the rpm enough without a lot of agita. the pulleys would also allow for slippage when the fan shaft gets dry/sticky. I’m in the middle of moving shop so I won’t try this right away, but I have a few Alcos stashed away that would benefit immensely. Keep us posted if you would please. J.R.
I’m going to do some experimenting this weekend and see where it leads me.
BTW, I’ve been an H0 modeler since 1965 and have no intention of changing scales! The challenge is to do this in H0, I’ve been super detailing locos for 20 years, this is just another detail and it would be pretty cool if successful.
I think this could easily be done with the motor shown. If you got creative, you could make that one motor drive all the fans as well. But it would probably be a lot easier to do one motor for each fan. I had some motors like that in a micro-helicopter…they are available on eBay for next to nothing. All you need to do is fabricate a mount for them, and wire them up in parallel to your power source.
Hi Jay,
how did the trial go? I used a toothbrush motor (similar in size to the little RC car motor) for a windmill, but as others have mentioned it ran too fast even for a windmill. I’m experimenting with some PWM (pulse width control) to get it to reliably run slowly. Dropping the voltage didn’t work, the motor just stalled or ran too fast.
There was a model European ROCO steam loco produced that used rotating fans that were obvious to anyone seeing it. It was a model of a loco using condensers to save water, hence the need for fans. The fans rotated slowly (about 50 RPM) so you noticed them and seeing them on a steam engine was unusual too. I can’t remember what motor it used, but it drove all the fans using gearing.
cheers