I am Lego

That's all good and well in theory. But if you had a stronger signal (as in RF) at shows how would you stop interference from other clubs? I do realize that there are umpteen rf channels to use but i doubt that lego would have provided 200 of them for us. One must remember the target market they are aiming at .

C'mon people , priorities please! Height should be dictated by the bar fridge that is mandatory.( Well it should be...) I do agree on the length and width being relevant to baseplates though. Mine is 5 plates wide at my end and 4 at my kids end. Due to the limited width of the 12m shipping container i converted to make the lego room, the tables had to go hard up against the wall. This does however stop the plummet of doom, and any derailments are reachable (at a stretch), or in the worst case as long as your tables are sturdy enough you can always kneel on them.

Word of warning. Don't skimp on the table. Mine are 4x8 and i used 3/4 rhs for the frame and legs. The top was 15mm mdf (craft wood). everything was fine until i started adding things. Then they started to develop bows (which is not very good for running trains over.). So i had to add another pair of legs to the middle.

Hi all, I guess it all comes down to whether you are satisfied with a non realistic looking switch box, just for the sake of it being "pure". Or whether you prefer an extremely realistic and elegant looking switch like Skaako's . I for one think Mike nailed it. You cannot get a cleaner looking solution to this "problem". The all lego version's are all big ,clunky and damn ugly and if i had to look at that all the time i would rather leave it as a manual switch. Oggy

Has anybody looked into replacing the actual electric motor in the "9v motor" with a higher voltage ,higher amp motor? I am currently looking for motors to drive switches with, and it occured to me that perhaps a 12v motor (with higher amp loading ( or even 9v with greater torque) might be an alternative. I haven't looked to see if Philo has any specifications for the original motor, so would any body else out there have a clue as to what the specs and measurements are? Oggy.

Hi Mike, I tracked down a different motor, a 6v with a body of 12x12 and 20 mm long. The shaft is 13mm long, the only thing i am unsure about is the shaft diameter ( the web page has conflicting info as to whether it is 1mm or 2mm). I am assuming that if you used a .8mm hole in the lego throw switch , that your shaft is 1mm ( especially as it would seem that 2mm is the same diameter as the pins on the throw switch). Cheers, Shane.

Nope, wheels are definatley at 90 degrees. If you hold the train in your hand and spin the wheels (rear only) the problem will occur. It doesn't seem to happen on tracks , but at some point i thought it mite with slightly uneven track heights. Plus it was fun to tinker with as was the gearing!

I don't know about anyone else. But I found that if you ran the train over your hand that it would lock the wheels. The reason for this is that only the rear wheels are "driven" and if they spin at a different speed to the front wheels the connecting rod looses allignment and the wheels lock. I figured that at some point on a layout that this would also occur so my solution was to extend the gearing and "drive" the front wheels as well. Cheeers, Oggy.

Hi there Mike, I have been along time watcher of this forum, but didn't join until today, and only because i wanted to ask you a few questions. I brought a few old cd-rom drives to extract the motors from, but unfortunatly they were some what different from the one's you used. I did track down some from Anaheim Automation.com . In particular the BDD-20-25 series motor ( i haven't brought any yet) . These appear to be the closest in dimensions to what you describe. They are 25mm long in the body and 20.4 by 15.4 wide and have a shaft that is 10mm long( is this close to what you use???) My other question is how did you attach the lego lever to the motor shaft so that it wouldn't spin freely? Look forward to your reply, Shane. P.S. and in response to all the purists who think that a "non" lego solution is a crime, since when do lego actually make the motors themselves?? They may well mold plastic but as for making the actual motors , well it would be fair to say that a third party "non"lego company is reponsable for that !!