HOn30 Rail Truck

Dave asked in the Weekend Photo Fun thread how I powered my rail truck. Here’s the Readers Digest version.

The motor was purchased on E-bay. I believe these are motors used in self-winding film cameras or at least are used in digital cameras for lens foucus.

Chassis Motor

The drive is a rubber band drive similar to the old Athearn drives, only not as fast. The reduction gear box makes it run real slow. I’ll link to a U-tube vido so you can see. I found out this rubber band, used to hold a females hair in a pony tail, streched after use. I’m now using a belt drive from a British source. The belts are square and don’t stretch.

The picture still has the old rubber band drive.

The power source will be batteries. It will be controled with a 2.4Ghz transmitter/reciever. Not yet purchased. Although I do have a source.

Two 3.7 volt lithum batteries will power the 5 volt motor and receiver.

My battery source is from these small helicopters. A person I know did a little bit of dumpster diving at a store that was throwing them out. He retrieved about a dozen or so of these.

So that’s the short version of building the rail truck. The second video has a link to how I built the rail truck.

The first video I use the 3.7 volt l

A creative and interesting model, Bernd. Thanks for sharing!

Bernd:

Very simple drive system! The hallmark of good design! Thanks for the thread.

Dave

Looks like there is no speed control, just put it on the tracks and it goes?

Mike, Dave,

Thanks for the kind words. Much appreciated.

@George,

The truck will be controlled via a 2.4Ghz transmitter/reciever or radio controlled. This videos were just to show the speed of the truck and directly hooked to the batteries for that purpose.

Bernd