Noisy Crossing Gates

Jim: 

I have (4) set of these gates. It is unfortunate they make so much noise.  I've had them apart and oiled them heavily with little change in the sound.  They are also notorious for failure.  The small plastic gear that is pressed on the motor shaft splits, though this can be fixed with CA (super glue). The limit switches, two screws on the back of the control panel may also need adjusted.  Top screw is the upper limit.  Bottom screw is the down limit. Clockwise on both should shorten the travel.  They are very nice looking crossing gates.

 

The verticle worm screw design would lend to just extending the shaft to below the table. The motor can also be removed from the base.  Though the motor is most of the noise.

 

I too did not like the noise these realistic looking gates made so I took them apart and removed the little motor and most of the gears leaving the worm gear that rotates the vertical shaft inside.  Then I installed a small robotics gear motor that turns about 75RPM to the shaft with a flex drive.  The wiring had to change since the motor I used was DC but now the gate comes down nice and slowly without much noise.

Yikes. I have a few sets of these gates on my layout, but they are not powered yet. Having read this post, it's apparent that I need to start thinking about another way to operate these great looking gates.

 

Thanks Jim for the warning.

Hey Kenai - that sounds like a neat project.  It would be great if you could post a full how-to with the parts you used.

If it makes you feel any better I have a set of Lionel gates that are the same way and I have 2 loops and run a train on each one. Both loops share the same gates and the layout is only 4x8 so you can imagine how often those gates go up and down!