The OO Garden Shed

By John Geeee

So, this is my first attempt at a working turntable. I bought the Dapol turntable kit because it was relatively smaller than others available and it was cheap. I thought I would try and motorise it and use it in the first loco yard. I bulit the kit easily and tried to paint it to make it look dirty and weathered. This was my first attempt and I think it shows!

I plonked a length of track on top of the turntable and added a couple of brass strips underneath it with wires leading to each side of the tracks. Once I had glued the circular base to the baseboards I then took a couple of pieces of flexi rail and bent them into a suitable semi-circle shapes and fixed these to the baseboards with some track pins. Then I wired one semi circle with a feed and the other with a return to povide the power. The brass strips under the turntable are positioned so that one pics up the feed and the other the return. Then I attached the table to a Maplins geared motor fixed under the baseboards. The motor was wired up to a Hornby controller which provided the variable speed. After a bit of fiddleing it eventually worked. It does not look exactly right and I am in two minds what to do about it. Sometimes I want to just rip it up altogether and other times I want to start again. The motor has become a pain and was not very good and often just slips if the table snags because of the brass strips. I have bought a new motor and some mecano gears etc so one day I may make a better job of it. I am also thinking about taking the piece of track off because it looks rubbish and replacing it with just some fixed rails and filling in the track bed.

So here are some pics and a video of its best days. For a better effort see later for my much improved workings with a Peco turntable.

Next Up - Lets see some action!!