I don't know if its the same with you folk, but I do get a bit of a kick out of finding a use for something for which it was never designed or intended. So when it came to needing a turntable for the new Tweedale appendage mentioned in the previous blog, the first thing to do was look through drawers and cupboards for 'something rotatable' that could be adapted. That something turned out to be a hand drill...

It had been bought some time ago from one of those bargain discount stores, but as a drill it proved to be totally useless - it just kept binding up when trying to twizzle the handle. Buy cheap buy twice, as the saying goes. However it did seem to run freely enough when turned from the chuck end. So if it refused pay for itself as a drill, it would just have to earn its keep as a turntable mechanism instead. This is what I ended up with...

The drill handles were removed and the metalwork glued to wooden feet with Araldite, which were then glued to a ply base with PVA. The trickiest part was getting the piece of track centred on the top. The motor and gearbox were bought from an exhibition tool stand, however the turntable could have been operated manually with just a handle gripped in the chuck. The motor is wired to the track supply via a switch so that it can be operated from the loco controller. Power to the rails is via paper-clip wipers sliding on a piece of circuit board. Rather crude but it works...

The whole contraption was screwed to wooden spacer blocks beneath the baseboard, then final sections of track on the board were added to line up with the turntable. At the insistence of Health & Safety some makeshift buffer stops were fixed to the edge of the abyss. These have already proved their worth after a visitor with the genes of a lemming and an unfamiliarity of the controller rammed a loco into them at quite an alarming speed.

At some stage the turntable will be finished off cosmetically with an overall planked wooden deck similar to that on the old Bembridge (IOW) turntable. That will cover the rotating pit beneath.

Here's the whole module attached to the main layout. It will be tidied up, but probably not fully scenified just yet. I should add that the scenic area will extend a few inches beyond the edges of the wooden track base seen here, and will disguise the sliced off turntable pit.

Cheers, Alan.