My first attempt at motorizing the Peco turntable kit was a good learning experience. First, the motor kit featured in the photo is inexpensive, but this brings with it a number of setbacks, the main one of which is noise.

The photo shows that the motor and gears are fitted directly to the underside of the plastic "dish". The glued strips of wood give the dish strength but I cannot say the result is good (and it looks dreadful!) The slack within the gears also means poor registration but surprisingly the DCC control turned out to be good and with some experience the tracks could be lined up using a very slow control on the motor.

Subsequent improvements included smothering the internal gearbox with lithium grease but the noise was still too much. The worm drive is useful in that the entire mechanism sits within a reasonable thickness of under-baseboard. There is a commercial solution that suspends the motor vertically below the spindle. I am sure this is a great solution, but not for my table top diorama as I simply don't have the space.

This installation was subsequently abandoned as I moved into a new apartment and had even less space to work with. More on that later.