I would like to animate a small race car track for a layout. I would like the mechanism that moves the cars to be invisible, and have been thinking about using moving magnets under a thin plastic track to achieve this (I’ve seen commercially made ice skating rinks and bumper car rides that appear to use this principle). But I’m stumped on how to make the cars move in anything but a simple circle if I mount the magnets on a rotating disc.
Does anyone have any links or ideas on how I could accomplish more interesting and realistic motion? I’ve thought about mounting the magnets on a moving chain with pulleys to define the turns, but that may be an overly complicated solution. I’m guessing that someone has already come up an elegant but simple way to animate small objects with magnets or some other mechanism.
The Faller go-kart track is essentially a subminiature slot car track, with a groove for a guidepin and metal rails that carry current to the motorized karts. My animated track will actually be part of a fun zone area on my slot car layout, so I’m hoping to come up with an animation system that doesn’t use conventional slot car technology to amaze and amuse my racing friends .
I’ve thought about using beaded chain and pulleys to guide the magnets since they’re readily available from industrial supplies, but if someone’s already come up with a system, I don’t want to reinvent the wheel.
Oh, boy, another crazy design ideas thread! Remember the one a couple of weeks back about a runaway braking system for a helix? That was fun, and produced some good outside-of-the-box thinking, too.
So, here’s my entry: Beneath the table, there is your basic rotating disc. The magnets are not small dot magnets, but rather bar magnets, mounted radially on the wheel. On top, the track is neither a circle nor an oval (although either would work) but a course only two cars wide which curves around the circle in an uneven manner. The course has walls which prevent the cars from leaving it.
As the magnet rotates, the car moves through the course. When it edges against a wall, it will move along the wall in and out along the bar magnet. As the wall moves away, the car is held in place by the magnet. This way, you can widen the track at a few points for pits, etc., and the cars will stay in the center of the track, held by the magnet.
Dipping into the box labeled, “Helix runaway brake systems,” we find, “Air nozzles.”
Why not rig a slot, as serpentine or regular as you want, for each car, then position small air jets to propel the vehicles. You would want to use low pressure - enough to move the cars at not-improbable speeds, not blast them into ballistic orbits. If you make the entire area under the racing facility one big plenum chamber, the jets could be as simple as holes drilled through the surface (or the bottom of the slot) at a shallow angle. Pressure could be provided by an electronic equipment cooling fan or similar low pressure/moderate volume source.
IIRC, there was a short article in the model press many moons ago about a gentleman who had built a somewhere near Z-scale layout powered by this principle.
Near Z scale nothing! Z scale is 1/240. The “Air Line” layout was 1/400 scale. They called it “M scale”…for microscopic. I saw it a time or two, I believe at a Great American Train Show. No tracks. Transparent plastic/cellulkoid strips held the trains on a course.
NO TRACKS! (small voice) that’s cheating(/small voice) Actually z scale is 1/220 a bit larger then 1/240 but how much detail can you put on those? not much you should see all the detail they put on z scale!
but still the engine isn’t pulling the train wich is cheating even more.
One idea would be to take two “simple circles” and connect them with a belt (i.e. two pulleys). This would give you an oval. Then have pins sticking out from the belt or if the belt can be made wide enough, you could attach the magnets directly to the belt. You would have to support the pins at the outer edge but that shouldn’t be too difficult.
I like the idea of an oval track using a belt and pulleys . . . especially if the pulleys have different diameters so that the cars will appear to take different “racing lines” on each end of the track (like an egg-shaped oval). And applying the idea of bar magnets affixed to the belt instead of dot magnets, the cars wouldn’t all have to follow the same line . . . there could be an inside line and an outside line.
just a thought, but i once came up wth ths solution for a friend making a model of a highway, and there was a thin wire implanted in the road. the cars were battery powered, and the front axles had small flat pieces of brass with magnets on them,so when the wire curved, the front wheels turned to follow.with this method, the cars could switch lanes and stuff too.and there could be more than one. this could also be used for having boats animated too i suppose.
I personally think it’s an over-do idea for model train layout but I admire your ambition. This might give you some ideas, Faller makes this thing called the ‘Car System’ where cars and buses can move around streets like real cars:
Very expensive and doing it yourself certainly will cut down cost. However, I am getting a bit lazy experimenting stuff…because most of the time it just end up wating a lot of time. Anyway, good luck and have fun.
How about a bycicle chain on its side with as many magnets attached as you wished. You could dictate the size of curves and change the path followed by using different size chain sprockets. Also it would be easy to attach a motor to one of the sprockets. It could be as long as you wanted by just adding more chain.
Batman, I think you’ve got it! I bought a link chain and four plastic sprockets a while ago at a surplus store for a rainy-day project. A quick-and-dirty “proof of concept” test indicates this is going to work. A dot or bar magnet sticks perfectly to the link chain axles, and the plastic gears don’t affect the magnets as the chain moves around them. I’ve got two 1" gears and two 2" gears on hand, so I think I can model a reasonably convincing track in a small space. Next items on the to-do list are to come up with a motor/gear combination that produces the right chain speed, and getting the magnetic attraction adjusted so that cars will track the magnets accurately but still roll freely.
I saw a TV show a couple of years ago about an O scale club’s layout where they used an HO scale engine pulling a flat car beneath a river scene. A large magnet was mounted on the HO flatcar, and a steamboat above it had a metal base. The HO scale train’s magnet pulled the steamboat up and down the plexiglass river. They had put supergearing in the HO engine to make it run very, very slow.