Simon G

I tried a 100 ohm resistor last night and the motor would barely start and wasnt at all controllable. Thinking about it, this is not surprising as the resistance across the Susumotor is about 10 ohms, so by adding a 100 ohm resistor, I increased the overall resistance by a factor of over 10. I cannot see how a 150 ohm resistor as mentioned on one of the links earlier would actually work (but then I dont know much about electronics!). The diode method is new to me, but I might give it a try if I can lay my hands on some of them - checking on Farnell/ebay etc, they certainly arent expensive - 50 for £1.99! I might just try a lower resistor first though.

I managed to find some brass sheet of the correct thickness and made up a sleeve, and it does fit really well, so I have now made the remotored Ringfield working nicely on the bench. It will need some Loctite or superglue to permanently secure the gear & sleeve in place. One advantage over the original Ringfield is that the spur gear will fit though the reamed chassis hole, so that you can fit the sleeve and gear onto the motor, then secure the motor in place. The remotored Lima pancake in the Class 117 power car had a good run for the first time last night, and I was pleasantly surprised at its performance. Starting and stopping was very smooth - much better than the Lima original. Top speed was way above anything you would want to run it at normally. Pulling power was limited - I tried to pull a rake of 7 Bachmann Mk1s, and there was a lot of slipping and it never really got going. Some additional weight might have solved the issue, but as I dont intend to pull that sort of load, it isnt essential for me. It is very responsive to low settings on a standard DC controller, and I didnt dare getting it to full power on the controller. One of the articles on the links earlier in this thread talked about putting a resistor in series, which might help protect it from too high a voltage. I have a variety of resistors, so might have a go at that - one of the suggestions on the links above was a 150 ohm one for a Dock Shunter, so that will be a starting point.

A brass sleeve is worth a try. I would guess that the chance of buying a suitable sleeve (1.5mm ID, 2.4mm OD) is about non-existent, so the best bet would be to take some brass sheet and try to make a sleeve. I will have to see if I have any suitable sheet at home this evening.

I contacted the guy in Finland who is selling the motors including gears on ebay (http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/261335739987?ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1423.l2649), and asked him if he could supply just the gears. He could, so I bought 5 off him. They are plastic gears, unlike the Hornby Ringfield brass ones, so I dont know how robust they will be. I did also dismantle a failed Lima armature to get the gears, but have the same problem as in the Ringfields in that the gear internal diameter is larger than the motor shaft, so needs some work to get it to fit.

I have had a go at increasing the shaft diameter with glue and allowing it to harden, but as soon as I try to fit the gear, the glue just comes away - I have tried a couple of types of glue. Any other thoughts on how to increase the diameter? From my own perspective, I am not after a strong pulling motor, as my intention is to power a Lima 117 DMU power car converted to a 121 railcar, so I dont need brute force!. What I am hoping to improve is the smooth running. I have now managed to get some Lima-compatible gears, and have fitted one of the Susumotors into the Pancake, and it seems to run OK on the bench. Will try it out at my local club on Thursday as I dont have a layout of my own.

I have now ground the lug off, and a friend had a 1/4 inch reamer, so the 5mm hole is now the correct 6.3mm size, and the collar of a Susumotor fits nice and snugly. The next problem is that the motor shaft diameter is approx 2mm and the Ringfield spur gear is 2.5mm, so I either need to build up the 2mm to 2.5mm or fill the spur gear hole with either glue or solder and then drill it back out again to 2mm. I made an attempt at increasing the motor shaft diameter, but it didnt work, so it will have to be the latter option of filling the spur gear hole and redrilling, unless anyone has a better suggestion?

Dave, thanks for the links. I have now 'harvested' the motors out of the old CD drives and have two of the sort on the first link, and also another can motor, which looks interesting. I have tried a quick look to see how easily it will fit into a Hornby Ringfield, as I have a spare casing in my spares box. There are two obvious obstacles to fitting one of these. As John Dent says, the casing needs to be drilled out to allow the CD motor to fit. The existing hole is about 5mm diameter and needs to be drilled out to 6.3mm (1/4 inch) diameter. The second obstacle is that there is a lug in the casing which prevents the CD motor from fitting snug & square into the motor casing. The lug was there to ensure correct fitting and location of the original magnet. I have (hopefully) attached a picture of the casing with a red circle around the lug. The solution to this is either to grind the lug away, or build up other parts of the casing to the same height. I haven't decided which option to try yet. I have also taken and uploaded a photo of the second motor (only one of the CD drives had this type). It was the motor which drives the read/write head back and forth over the CD. It runs nicely with a 9V battery across it. I might try it as an X03/4 type alternative. It already has a plastic housing which will help mounting it in a loco. I hope to have a look at the Lima re-motoring tomorrow at a club night, as the club has a better selection of tools than I have at home!

I have looked on line and cant actually find any tutorials! Do you have a link to one? I have a couple of Lima Pancakes that I would like to improve, and am about to decommission two old PCs, so might dismantle the CD drives and remove the motors.

Frank - you are a star! It was indeed a faulty Polyswitch. We opened up the case and located the 2 Polyswitches and checked the resistance across each before trying to run anything. The good one was effectively 0 ohms, and the faulty one was about 2 ohms. After running a high current loco until it stopped, I rechecked the faulty one and it was up to 12 ohms and was only settling slowly, and seemed to stop at 4 ohms long after it had 'cooled'. I managed to source some ( a pack of 5 on ebay was cheaper than 1 on rapidonline after P&P. We removed the faulty one and put a new one in place, and... nothing! Further investigation showed that while soldering the new one in place, we had bridged a connection on the PCB. Once this had been sorted, everything runs as sweet as it should. My Triang Class 31 ran round for many circuits at high speed without a hitch. And we now have 4 spares! Many thanks for your help. Simon

Frank, Thanks for the reply. We have not got round to investigating the fault further yet, so your post is very timely! From what you say, a faulty Polyswitch could easily be causing our problems. Hopefully, we will be able to check it out at the next club night. I will post any progress back onto this thread. Cheers, Simon

At our Club, we have an ONtrack Dual Track Controller, model MPC3. Until recently, it has performed faultlessly for years. Now, one track has developed a fault. On locos that take a heavy current, such as Hornby Dublo, Triang etc, the locos run for a few seconds, then slow to a halt. Modern Hornby & Bachmann locos can run happily round the layout without this problem. We dont know exactly what might be causing this! A thermal overload would normally be a more rapid stop - unless anyone knows differently! Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.

Many thanks also - I must have clicked 'Post' on my reply to Butler Henderson a few seconds after you posted the D11 identification! Have googled D11 and it is the same as my motor. They both run nicely, so just need to find a use for them, or sell them on.

Many thanks for the DS10 identification - that is spot on, having googled DS10 and found some pictures. I dont think that the other is an X03/4 replacement, as it is only 2/3rds the size of an X03/4. Even with the long shaft, it is only just as long as an X04. I would require a special mount or some careful work to get it to replace an X03/4.

I acquired the motors in the picture as part of a batch of largely X03/X04 and Airifx motors, but havent a clue what they are. Someone did suggest that they might be Anchoridge ones, but wasnt sure. Thanks in advance!

We used to save on clothes in a different way. When I went to secondary school, I was still wearing short trousers for a year or so. They lasted an awful lot longer as they couldnt go through at the knees! You wont even spot a kid in first year primary school in short trousers now. Odd thing is that I dont remember feeling cold, even in winter. I guess that as I used to charge around at full throttle all the time, I kept myself warm! In winter, a great sledge could be made out of a sheet of corrugated iron - just bend up the front foot of the sheet and you had the fastest thing on the slopes (but God help any poor soul who got in the way - they were liable to be sliced in two!). As to cars, my first was a Mk2 Vauxhall Viva, that initially burned petrol for fun. Without any real knowledge or experience I changed the rotor arm, adjusted the points (remember them!) and adjusted the spark plug gaps. End result - over 40 mpg. Today it would over £100 for a "black box", plus a load more to fit said "black box".

Many years ago, a pre-Windows word processor spell-checker found the name 'McAreavey' in some meeting minutes I had written and decided to alter it to 'Machiavelli'. Even the individual concerned found this rather funny at the next meeting.

Mike, thanks again for that - I had started to look at CSS to make the look and feel consistent across the Site. As to PHP, I will check on the host site and maybe have a look at that as well. Thanks to others for more ideas and offers of support - it is all much appreciated. Cheers, Simon

So you can use Internet Explorer to upload pages? I didnt realise that. Another thing to experiment with! I couldnt resist starting to look at htm editing after my earlier post this evening. The W3 Schools site mentioned by red death is really good and clear and seems to make the whole thing quite easy to pick up and understand. I have been pasting their examples into a file in a Test Folder and learning by experimenting. Cheers, Simon

Wow - what good stuff! Thanks as ever, guys. In the medium/long term, I will probably go for the htm text editor route, such as Notepad++. In the past, I have programmed in Fortran, Basic, and briefly even Z80 machine code (remember Z80s?), so htm code shouldnt be too much of a challenge. However, in the short term, I will try WYSIWYG packages like Kompozer or Amaya just to get me going. I will certainly look at the htm Tutorials suggested by red death - winter is coming and learning the htm coding will help to pass those long dark evenings! I have tried with Frontpage, without the extensions enabled (as discussed by beast66606), but still ran into problems. Out of interest, I ran the W3 Validator System on a couple of the existing web pages, and it showed them to be riddled with errors and warnings. I guess that I could continue to use Frontpage for the uploading to the website, even when using a different editor to generate the web pages. As Frontpage was discontinued in 2006, it explains why it isnt bundled with Office 2010, like it used to be with Office 2003. Cheers, Simon

I am looking for some advice on what software people have used to create web pages and upload them onto websites. In a moment of madness, I volunteered to maintain the website for the Derwent Railway Society (the original DRS!), based in West Cumbria. The previous webmaster suggested I use Dreamweaver - then I saw how much it costs to get a version - over £300, which is far too steep. My own PC has Microsoft Frontpage on it, but the hosting site (www.trainweb.org) does not recommend the use of Frontpage. Therefore, I am looking for a cheap (or free) package that I can use to update the site (www.trainweb.org/drs). Any advice gratefully received. Simon