Replacing the Lionel Vibrotor with a Small DC Motor.

Why not just buy the new version?

Stan Roy, the man who set the unofficial world record for simultaneous toy train operation back in the early 90's, did a rather thorough explanation on how he replaced the vibrator motor with a DC can motor you'd typically find at Radioshack and a rubber band belt. The only thing is he didn't indicate the exact type of motor he used, but it looks like a relatively straight forward conversion.

Hi Dennis.....

Did you get the answers you were looking for? If not I think I can help. I just converted the Culvert Loader/Unloader and Forklift to DC can motors using parts from Amazon. They work very smoothly now.

BTW, the accessories I converted were in good shape but not pristine, so I was not worried about losing any value as a "collectible".

Let me know.

Junior, I would interested in the motor product name, and stock # if you could post it.

DC hobby motors I find are mostly too high RPM. Thanks UnclePeteRR

Hello UnclePeteRR!

Sure....I'd be happy to provide those. First let me explain what I did so that you understand the process.

Those OLDER Lionel accessories are strictly AC; hence the Vibrotor motor. And I'm guess that back in the 50's and 60's technology didn't exist yet for companies to produce electric motors so small (or affordable).

Anyway, in addition to removing/replacing the Vibrotor with a small DC  motor, I also added an AC-to-DC Buck variable voltage Converter board.

Adding the board accomplished three things for me:

1. It converted the AC coming into the accessory to DC,

2. The boards I bought have a small potentiometer on them which you use to set the output DC voltage; which allowed me to control the DC motor RPM,

3. The lowered DC voltage allowed me to add an LED (which still at times needed an in-line resistor) to add light to the accessory's control tower.

I also bought a set of various sizes of plastic pulleys with belts. This actually worked out very well for driving the accessory action.

I bought everything from Amazon. And I would be happy to post screen prints but I'm not sure that's allowed (would someone confirm?). If it is allowed I will post them right away.

I can also add pictures of the completed conversion so you can see how everything fit into the accessories.

Junior,

    I would love to see that also

@Junior posted:

I bought everything from Amazon. And I would be happy to post screen prints but I'm not sure that's allowed (would someone confirm?). If it is allowed I will post them right away.

I can also add pictures of the completed conversion so you can see how everything fit into the accessories.

I see screen prints from many sources, including eBay here, so I think that's probably OK.  I know they come down on actual product links, especially to eBay.

Hi Everyone....

As promised, below are the Amazon screen prints of the items I purchased/used. There are also 3 videos of 2 converted accessories along with some installation notes.

The motors:

The boards:

The pulleys:

A note on the Buck Converter boards....as Stan2004 has often posted, you can purchase these from China for quite a bit less. But I didn't want to wait several weeks for the boards, so I purchased them from Amazon.

Below are pictures of the Culvert Unloader changes:

The screws used to mount the motor are metric M2x8 with matching washers and nuts. These are pretty tiny but were a perfect fit.

These are pictures of the Forklift changes:

It's hard to see, but the motor is mounted underneath.

Here are the videos:

Culvert Unloader:

Forklift:

Forklift Internals:

Final notes:

1. I did not remove any of the original gears, pulleys etc. I found that the pulley used by the Vibrotor to move the mechanism was perfect for the new pulley/belt.

2. Because these motors are so small, they don't have a lot of torque. As a result, I used the smallest pulleys in the pack.

3. The motor shaft are 2mm (as I recall). The pulley holes are  approx. 1.8 mm. So I had to hand drill (I did not used a power drill) the pulley holes out a bit to fit them on the motor shafts. Doing that still provided a snug fit on the motor shaft.

4. Removing the original Vibrotor and mounting bracket was the easiest part. I wedged a screwdriver in the gap where the Vibrotor bracket attached to the frame and gave it a twist. It popped right off.

Two of the mounting brackets were spot welded onto the frame. One was attached with screws.

5. I used a paint pencil to mark the converter board terminals so I knew which was AC in and which was DC out with poles.

6. I hot glued plastic standoffs onto the converter boards, then hot glued those standoffs onto the metal bases.

7. As I noted earlier, the motor speed is set my adjusting the converter board's output voltage.

And that's it! Please let me know if you have any questions.

@Junior thanks for sharing the components you utilized. I’ve never seen a Culvert Unloader work so effortlessly and smoothly. I may have to convert mine.  

Great Work! What you and Stan Roy did back in the 90's is what Lionel should of done to the Culvert Twins, instead of the ridiculous set up they came out with in the late 90's and the more recent issues.

I remember Stan Roy, also put a can motor in the 313 Bascule Bridge, worked great!

Thanks for sharing!

Rich and Mark....

Thanks for the kudos. Yeah....they work well. I bought the accessories at Dupage County fairgrounds quite a few years ago (when we lived  in Illinois). They host (hosted?) a very large train show the 2nd Sunday of every month.

As mentioned before, these were in decent condition but definitely not collectable quality. And being so old; I could not get the Vibrotor to work at all let alone reliably.

As for the Culvert Unloader; I think I'm going to slow it down a bit more. I've been away from the accessories for a few days and after recording it in action it seems a bit too fast for my tastes.

And....not sure if you noticed; I put a clear LED (with an in-line resistor) in the control cab of the Unloader and glued in frosted windows cut from a used milk bottle (if you look at the pics, you'll see a red plug. That's for the LED). I thought it could use a bit of sprucing up. I'm also working on adding guard rails and a ladder with safety cage from the base to the upper level/plastic base.

The culvert unloader and the forklift look like TURBO accessories.

You could probably find a gear motor that would be an ideal match to slow things down.

@gunrunnerjohn posted:

The culvert unloader and the forklift look like TURBO accessories.

You could probably find a gear motor that would be an ideal match to slow things down.

GRJ,

Are you suggesting a different motor or slowing the action down by adjusting he voltage?

I'm talking a gear motor, one that has a reduction gear as part of the package, tons of them on places like eBay.

Hey John....

Yeah....I'm thinking the operator had a little too much coffee 😁!

The board output voltage for the video above was set at about 9v. I dialed down the board's output voltage to 5.94v for this video. I like it a lot better....

That looks more reasonable.

@Junior posted:

Hi Everyone....

As promised, below are the Amazon screen prints of the items I purchased/used. There are also 3 videos of 2 converted accessories along with some installation notes.

The motors:

The boards:

The pulleys:

A note on the Buck Converter boards....as Stan2004 has often posted, you can purchase these from China for quite a bit less. But I didn't want to wait several weeks for the boards, so I purchased them from Amazon.

Below are pictures of the Culvert Unloader changes:

The screws used to mount the motor are metric M2x8 with matching washers and nuts. These are pretty tiny but were a perfect fit.

These are pictures of the Forklift changes:

It's hard to see, but the motor is mounted underneath.

Here are the videos:

Culvert Unloader:

Forklift:

Forklift Internals:

Final notes:

1. I did not remove any of the original gears, pulleys etc. I found that the pulley used by the Vibrotor to move the mechanism was perfect for the new pulley/belt.

2. Because these motors are so small, they don't have a lot of torque. As a result, I used the smallest pulleys in the pack.

3. The motor shaft are 2mm (as I recall). The pulley holes are  approx. 1.8 mm. So I had to hand drill (I did not used a power drill) the pulley holes out a bit to fit them on the motor shafts. Doing that still provided a snug fit on the motor shaft.

4. Removing the original Vibrotor and mounting bracket was the easiest part. I wedged a screwdriver in the gap where the Vibrotor bracket attached to the frame and gave it a twist. It popped right off.

Two of the mounting brackets were spot welded onto the frame. One was attached with screws.

5. I used a paint pencil to mark the converter board terminals so I knew which was AC in and which was DC out with poles.

6. I hot glued plastic standoffs onto the converter boards, then hot glued those standoffs onto the metal bases.

7. As I noted earlier, the motor speed is set my adjusting the converter board's output voltage.

And that's it! Please let me know if you have any questions.

Nice work indeed, and thanks for listing all the information. I have a postwar culvert unloaded and the string always comes off even at low voltage. When you did this conversion does it eliminate the string that goes around pulley, being replaced but the rubber belt.

thanks for the great post.

joe

Hello Joe!

Yes....you are correct. That large white pulley you see in the pictures is where the original string you're referring to was wrapped around. It is/was attached by a spring at one end and by a crimped ferrule at the other end as part of the Vibrotor mounting bracket.

I should also make note about drilling the holes for the replacement motor mounting bracket. I marked the areas where the new holes need to be drilled then used a center punch to mark them so that the drill bit didn't try to "walk" away from that area. Those drill holes were pretty small and fairly close together.

And make sure you set the flat shaft side motor as level to the gear frame as possible. That will keep the motor shaft vertical and in-line/parallel with the pulley's vertical shaft. That'll prevent the little rubber belt from peeling off of the drive pulley. If you expand the Culvert Unloader picture, you'll see a pencil line I drew on the gear frame. I used that as a reference for aligning the new motor's mounting bracket.

Just take your time to line things up.

Let me know if you have any more questions.

Junior, thank you very much for posting the excellent how-to for converting vibrotor to DC motor.

Hello Susan!

Thank you for the kind words. I do enjoy tinkering with this kind of stuff. I especially enjoy the animation that some of  Lionel's accessories bring to our hobby.

Junior, that’s some nice work. A very enjoyable part of the hobby.

Very helpful Junior.  Thank you!  Did you also install a potentiometer to step the AC input voltage down to 12v or do you run all your accessories at 12v?  Curious if driving the input to the board at 14 to 16v would damage the board. 

Excellent work !!

@romiller49 Thanks Rod! Sorry for the SUPER LATE response! I must've missed the notification....

Thanks @Just another Engineer named Steve....

I use these AC-to-DC Buck Converters (you can get them from Amazon or China (via eBay....take quite a bit longer to get but the prices are better than Amazon).

They can handle a range of AC voltage coming in and You set the out going DC voltage via an on-board pot (there's a small brass screw head on a blue box You adjust). They even have a version with a built volt meter if you don't have your own meter.

And the physical size just happens to fit well in the accessories I converted.

Thanks @NYC 428. These accessories where sitting in boxes for years (I bought them at a Train Show pretty cheap) so I knew the Vibrotors were shot. The hardest part was pulling all the items together to do the conversion.

Thanks again Junior.  So driving the input with max voltage from transformer (18 - 20vAC) wont burn out components on the board?   

Sorry Junior.  Just found the specs.  Input limited by filter capacitor at 50v.  Good to go!! Thanks!!!

Has anyone done a similar conversion to the MPC era horse car? I assume that uses a vibrotor too? I've never been able to get that thing to work properly since new.

Roger

@bimmer050.....

Hi Roger. First, I want to clarify what accessory(s) you're talking about.

If you're talking about the horse/cattle car and corral that loads/unloads the animals; replacing the Vibrotor may be problematic.

I say this because these accessories work on the same principle used in the old football games that had moving figures....a vibrating surface. In the case of the Lionel accessories, the animal/figures have little nubs protruding from the base of the animal (sometimes the nubs are angled to better control the direction of the figure). The vibrating of the surface causes the figures to move. And in the rail car and the corral's case, direction is controlled by opening and closing gates. No vibration....no movement.

So, if this is the accessory type your are referring to, I think it depends too much on that vibrating mechanism to work.

Lionel offers (offered?) another horse car where horse heads bob in and out of the side of the rail car. But I don't think this is the one you mean. That one works on the motion of the car (kinda like a pendulum movement) to make the horse heads move.

But if I'm way off base on this, please let me know.

I'm with Junior on this one. The horse corral /car is like the barrel loading ramp: Both depend on vibration to create motion. DC motors will not do this, unless they are connected to something that creates vibration. That's why Lionel's Vibrator motor was/is ideal for the application: it vibrates. But it is a poor choice when the accessory needs rotary motion, either at the end, or in the drive train. As many, many people have found out over the years, they are very finicky, tough to keep in adjustment, and drive fingers are subject to wear.

Chris

LVHR

So....I was thinking more about this "challenge". There exists two (that I know of) systems that animate or move vehicles. One is made/sold by Faller (for HO vehicles), the other is made/sold by Magnorail (again for HO vehicles). They are completely different approaches to vehicle movement.

The Faller system uses a wire buried in the surface (eg. a road). The vehicles are battery powered and followed the wire. The modeler creates a route on their layout using the wire for the vehicle(s) to follow.

The Magnorail approach uses a "link" system (not unlike a bicycle chain) that contains magnet discs every so often. Again, the link system is used to create a route on the layout.  The link "route" is hidden under a surface (again, the road). The vehicles (even a bicyclist) is dragged along by the magnet(s) embedded in the chain of links.

They both are very slick systems and provide another level of animation to model railroads.

Adapting either of these approaches to the only the corral would require a major reengineering of the corral itself. It would probably be easier to build a whole new corral from scratch than try to retrofit the existing Lionel corral.

But the real problem is the rail car! How do you get the animals into and out of the rail car using either of these new approaches (this problem actually makes my head hurt trying to think of a solution )....wow!

Just my  2 cents.....

If the horse application is to vibrate/shake a surface, an alternative would be to use an inexpensive DC-motor with an off-centered or off-balance weight (a.k.a. eccentric).

I was sure this has been discussed in previous OGR threads but I couldn't find what I was thinking using the OGR Search function. Perhaps someone else has better skill at this.

In any case, it's ironic that in the original application the vibrating mechanism is converted to a rotating output.  In this case it's a rotating mechanism (motor) being converted to a vibrating output!

The inexpensive DC can motor with eccentric weight is used to vibrate/shake a bottle of paint.

Obviously this "technology" is replicated a billion times over in the vibrator function in a pager, cellphone, smartphone, etc..

The trick is to choose an appropriate eccentric weight and spin the motor at a speed that replicates the original action.  In the original mechanism the shaking was always at 60 Hz.  To increase/decrease the shaking, you increase/decrease the applied AC voltage.

With a DC motor and eccentric weight, the shaking frequency is proportional to the applied DC voltage.  I'd think the same AC-to-DC converter module discussed earlier in the thread could be used to fine tune the action.  Since 60 Hz is 3600 RPM, this is in the realm of the speed of any DC can motor.  To change to amount of vibration you'd have to fuss with the eccentric weight or how the motor is mechanically coupled to the vibrating surface.

DC vibrating motors are inexpensive and available in a wide variety of sizes.  The tiny ones are available for less than a buck, so perhaps using a handful of them might work in a tight-quarters situation.

Again, I'm sure I've seen this discussed in earlier OGR thread(s) but couldn't find it.

@stan2004.....That's BRILLIANT ! Hadn't even considered that approach. Now that you mention it, I've seen many varying sizes and types of vibrating motors; some being very small indeed (like those used in pagers, smart phones, what have you).

Your right about hitting the sweet spot in regard to the frequency. Can we assume (oh Boy....opening a can of worms here!) that the default frequency of the vibrotor vibrations would be 60Hz?

I'm not too familiar with this accessory but I seem to dimly recall there was an adjustment screw or some thing to adjust the vibration? I also thought Lionel recommended mounting the corral to the bench work using rubber grommets (which I believe they did not supply)?

I don't have one of these accessories to experiment on....but this certainly a viable option.

Oops! Sorry @stan2004......should've read your WHOLE response (instead of skimming it) before asking my questions......which you've already answered .

Junior,

Great job with the retrofits.  Just found this post as I am having a lot of difficulty with the 342 culvert unloader.

I'm just about to order the parts you used and wanted to make sure I have the correct motor.

The one I found on Amazon is 6500 rpm at 12V.  Is that the one?  It seems very fast so that's why I am checking.  What voltage do you run it at?

Thanks, Bob

@TrainCzar posted:

Junior,

Great job with the retrofits.  Just found this post as I am having a lot of difficulty with the 342 culvert unloader.

I'm just about to order the parts you used and wanted to make sure I have the correct motor.

The one I found on Amazon is 6500 rpm at 12V.  Is that the one?  It seems very fast so that's why I am checking.  What voltage do you run it at?

Thanks, Bob

Hi Bob....

I searched my Amazon purchase history those are the motors I used (6500 RPM). Amazon's ASIN Number is B07CJNXTV1.

I don't remember the voltage I set the buck converter at....but I'm thinking it was around 4 - 5 volts. Adjusting the voltage adjusts the speed the accessory runs at. It does takes a bit of experimentation to get the speed "right" (which is what looks good to you) .

I do remember @gunrunnerjohn teasing me about my initial voltage setting being too high/fast.....as in TURBO speed....he was right.

Hope this helps!

Thanks Junior,

I found that motor on amazon.  They are really low cost, may be good for lots of other uses.

I replaced the motor in my Lionel 464 sawmill.  The vibrating motor made a scary amount of noise.  It runs really well with the new motor.

https://ogrforum.com/...ts-and-modifications

I like the idea of using the DC vibrating motors for the horse/cattle corral.  I think it would work well once the voltage was adjusted to get the best frequency of vibration.  I use a couple of vibrating motors on my coal fired power plant coal unloader.  They have been working great since I installed them three years ago.

https://ogrforum.com/...on-lionel-840-and-97