If you have been following, I am building a working Ski Lift.
Does any one have a simple way of fastening the rolling cable wheels to the tower. It needs to be a good installation or the cable will not run correctly.
The wheels will be HO train wheels with some sort of material opposite the flange so the cable will not come off.
Why don’t you look into minature pulleys: https://sdp-si.com/eStore/? There’s an index of parts on left side of screen. Looks like they have one that’s 1/2 inch in diameter.
If you have a decent hobby shop, check out their ship-building supplies. I found small brass pulleys for my overhead crane there.
If your ski lift will be operational, you can mount the pulleys on lengths of music wire of the proper diameter, and you should be able to fashion suitable pillow blocks from styrene.
I think some sort of pulley is the right approach. If you don’t have flanges on both sides, the cable just isn’t going to stay on. You could glue a couple of N-scale wheels together, face-to-face, to make a roller that the grip will clear a bit easier.
However, this puts even more of a premium on getting the grip that holds the chair to the cable correct. It’s got to ride up over the pulley.
To hold the pulleys on the axle, I’d just go with a short collar cut from a piece of brass tubing whose inside diameter is just slightly larger than the axle. Attach it with CA.
I don’t think this will work very well. The piece of metal might keep the cable from sliding off, but the railroad wheel has a taper on the flange side so the cable will tend to ride away from the flange and against that piece of metal. I still say a pulley of some sort is your answer. Either one you can buy, or one that someone can machine for you.
You mentioned before about seeing if a pulley was in the budget. My opinion is that if you are going to expend a lot of effort on this thing you should be prepared to do the job as right as you can the first time.
You mention a pulley system would be best. The lift will have a Bull wheel an idler wheel and is powered by a printer motor with the wheels on the towers to allow the cable to roll over.
I am confused. Isn’t this a pulley system?
Thanks for the advise on the flange, I hadn’t thought about that.
I agree with your thought about doing it right. That is why I am spending all this time in research.
LION would skip the pulleys and run the cable across a brass shim with brass or plastic guides on either side. Nobody is going to look in there to see if you actually modeled the wheels.
BTW: you must concede that the subject did not work here. You could have called it “help building a ski lift”
LION had no clew what sort of lift you were using or why it needed wheels, and so did not look in here until you made a ruckus about it.
If it were me (and it is not) and the returning skiers from a commercial model lift bothered me I might try putting a mirror between the uphill and downhill legs hiding the downhill chair riders and doubling the up hill ones.
