This is the ski chair lift on my layout, from a Walthers commercial kit.The ski lift is part of a skate & ski resort on a 2 ft. high hill. I used HO scale skiers and Ho scale skaters on this animated skate & ski resort. On the commercial set the cable is fine elastic black string. How about using two sets of vertical pulleys, (about 2 inches apart), set to turn in opposite directions by two slow motion motors. Have the pulleys hidden in shacks at the top and bottom of the hill. If the chair vertical bars were glued to small beads,(not glued to the string), the bars would be lifted horizontally by the rims of the pulleys and hang down on the ascent and descent. Forget about the support at the center of the hill. The skaters are magnetically moved in random patterns around the pond,on the commercial set. Possibly, one could have the downhill skiers navigate the hill, if glued to a very fine mono-filament thread attached to a third pulley system. Just a couple of ideas. Bob Hahn
With all due respect, I’ve been skiing for 35 years, and I can count the number of skiers I’ve seen riding down on a chairlift on one finger.
Hello I have been thinking about this lift. First what are you going to use for a cable? Should be thin to big and it wont look right. What are you making the chair’s out of ? The bottom should be heavy so they hang down and look right. How big will the lift shacks be.
With that in mind. I think you can use a one pulley on top and one at the bottom. Two in each shack one going up hill and one down hill The chairs should twist the cable as it goes over the pulley and down though the floor. Need room to swing the chair’s. Make the bull wheels fake.
I found a video see how they go in the shack under the guide. You can make a guide like that to swing them down instead of around. And the other side would swing up.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAwcIDeUMAI
Hope this helps Frank
Frank
Enjoyed the video. I keep getting new ideas.
Thanks
Harold
The trouble with skiing is that it takes a lot of my time. But, I’m back and I did get some pictures. I chose a couple of the older lifts at Sunday River in Maine. They are still newer than the Transition Era, but much more typical of older lifts than today’s high-speed 6-pack chairs.
This is the top of a simple chair. It’s a triple, like all of these. Back in the 50’s double chairs would have been more common. The frames of the chairs are metal, but the back rests consist of wooden slats. Sunday River has put black cushions on the seats themselves. Cushions are a relatively recent luxury though, and in the old days the seats would have been bare metal or wood.
In no particular order, this is the detail of a fixed-grip connection to the cable. This chair rotates clockwise, so the wheel would be to the right of the cable.\
Looking up the mountain, here’s a few chairs and a lift tower. I can’t recall ever seeing a tower that was not a T configuration for a chairlift. The arch shown in one of the earlier model pictures would be more commonly used for a T-bar lift where the skiers stay on the surface. There are some wires running up the center, too. I assume they’re used for safety interlocks, with indicators if a cable slips off a wheel. I’m not sure when those were introduced.
