Embarking on the journey of creating a Moving Car system begins with the essential step of sketching out your Road and Landscape plan on a board. While there's a pre-made landscape mat available in the market, such as the (Marklin 8930 Toporama Landscape mat), which is priced at approximately $220 in auctions and remains consistently sought after.
Rather than opting for the original landscape mat, I chose the path of faithfully replicating it. :-)
Once I assembled the tracks according to the plan (you can refer to the track plan in my previous blog for download), I successfully mapped the positions of buildings and roads by referencing the original landscape picture of the layout. This process wasn't too challenging. I began by determining the dimensions of structures like the Goppingen station and marked their locations adjacent to the tracks. Then, in the remaining space, I easily outlined the road section and the other buildings.
The outlined road section was carefully cut out and positioned on a plain board. This step served as the foundation for marking the road and installing the Moving Car System Motor Gear unit and Rails.
The 3D Printed parts for the Moving Car system essentially has the following components.
Chain beads - needed print 200 of those to connect to one another to form the track chain
Chain Track that holds and guides the chain to move
Motor Gear Assembly - where the gear is attached to motor which helps to push the chains across the track
The loop assembly has two parts the - The wheel and turn around loop to guide the track
The Motor and gear assembly is mounted on side of the track, it is the main component that drives the chain in the track loop. The DC Geared Motor operates at 12V, and is attached the one of the gear (Pink) as in figure, the blue color in fig servers as counter direction push, it is not attached to any motor. The chain slips between the two gears with help of the Rubber O Ring - (link description given below for purchase), This O -Ring creates the friction to move the chain.
The loop assembly is used to make 180 degree turn of the chain, if there track system is long and narrow as in this case in our Toporama layout, you will be needing this essentially
The fully laid track with 2 Loops and one motor drive unit as it shown, the track is fixed on the 12 mm Plywood, it planned to raise the plywood base by 10 mm using foam board to fix the Road surface
The Chain bead has the provision to mount 3 MM Diameter magnet. The beads design was altered to remove the peg based interlocking to a small hole to provision a simple wire to pass through and make tie.
The road surface was 0.5mm glass acrylic sheet, which was later stickered with gray color vinyl sticker.
The vehicles was attached the brass slider which was designed in CAD and Laser cut from .5mm thick Brass sheet, fig1, the cut slider is attached the bottom of the vehicle using Epoxy glue along with Magnets in pole orientation with the one that is attached the chain.
The big advantage of this system is you can run any scale as in the figure you can run from 1:300 scale to the 1:87 Scale without any scale restriction. !
In the image above, you can observe a 1:200 scale scooter and car smoothly traversing the road! For a more detailed understanding of the construction process of this system, I've provided a link to a YouTube video below. Feel free to watch it for a visual explanation, and I welcome your comments and feedback.
Following video explains the construction procedure in detail.
Following are the links to items purchased other than those printed in 3D.
Geared DC Motor – 50 RPM
https://thinkrobotics.in/products/25mm-metal-gearmotors?_pos=4&_psq=DC%20Geared&_ss=e&_v=1.0
O Ring
https://www.amazon.in/gp/product/B00AKW5PKS/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o09_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
DC Motor Controller
https://www.electronicscomp.com/ccm5d-digital-pwm-dc-motor-speed-controller-with-display?search=DC%20Motor%20control