Would This Motor Work for a Swinging Bell Mod?

Rod, way too big. Go to youtube and search on Laurie Mclean Trains. You can get these gear motors at pololu.com. They are 6mm in diameter same as a pencil. Get the one with the greatest gear reduction, about 1000:1.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJM_dqxge9s

Pete

It would be much easier to do it the way Lionel does.

There is an electromagnet under the shell and a fixed magnet in the bell. The magnetic flux from the electromagnet passes through the diecast, or plastic, or brass shell and pulls on the magnet in the bell. The electromagnet is pulsed, making the bell move.

Ferrous metal, magnetizable metal, like steel will block the flux from the electromagnet, but diecast, plastic, aluminum and brass will not.

@RoyBoy posted:

It would be much easier to do it the way Lionel does.

There is an electromagnet under the shell and a fixed magnet in the bell. The magnetic flux from the electromagnet passes through the diecast, or plastic, or brass shell and pulls on the magnet in the bell. The electromagnet is pulsed, making the bell move.

Ferrous metal, magnetizable metal, like steel will block the flux from the electromagnet, but diecast, plastic, aluminum and brass will not.

Roy, you can't so this with the Lionel magnet. This is a K-Line TMCC engine.

Pete

Pete I see what you mean about that tiny 6mm motor! Yikes that is small. Way better choice than the one I found.

So you would want the motor to be activated the entire time that the bell function is actvated in tmcc or Legacy I think. How would yo go about doing that?

The motor-gearbox I showed might be a good choice for something like moving the 282 gantry crane back and forth on a track.

Rod

Rod, If you are putting this in a Legacy engine you only need a Lionel Bell board. Pretty sure you can still get these. Because I put it in a TMCC engine I had to add an RCDR Legacy receiver board. It takes the bell signal and feeds it to the bell board which only responds to Legacy commands. Just as a Legacy engine responds to a Cab1 TMCC command, the RCDR and Bell board will respond to a bell command from a TMCC controller.

A bell board puts out a square wave in synchrony with the bell sound. I was able to use that output directly to power the motor by simply adding a capacitor across the motor to smooth out the square wave plus a pot in series to adjust the speed of the motor as Laurie demonstrates in the video so the bell moves with sound.

Laurie has many other videos where he uses these motors to animate figures. Something doable with DCC as you can add decoders. The bell board is essentially a stand alone decoder that outputs a voltage in response to a bell command.

Pete

That is a very impressive bell mod. Kudos to you.

Pete thanks for the detailed info for actuating a bell. It all makes sense, but I'm not sure I will go to all the effort. Gotta think about it a bit.

Regards, Rod

I think it was easier when Lionel was mass producing them.

Rod, the mechanical part is pretty easy actually. I just drilled a hole in cab front and installed an eyelet in the dome. The motor is mounted in the cab roof. In the engine I did fitting the extra boards took much longer as I had to fit them in the tender and use a different tether with more conductors.
As far as using a bell coil like Lionel did I believe they may be out of stock. Simple coil but tedious to make your own.

If you watch any more of Laurie’s videos he has animated most all of the train crew. I still want to do a fireman shoveling coal. Just have to figure out a good way to trigger it, likely the front coupler signal.

Pete

This would be an awesome mod to do! I especially like the wire animation to be honest.

I wonder if you could find a way to make the bell automatically swing below a specific speed.

@BillYo414 posted:

This would be an awesome mod to do! I especially like the wire animation to be honest.

I wonder if you could find a way to make the bell automatically swing below a specific speed.

Using the motor rather than a magnet you control the speed with a pot. Check out the youtube link above. Using a bell magnet as Lionel does, speed is determined by the frequency of the bell sound.

Pete

@BillYo414 posted:

I wonder if you could find a way to make the bell automatically swing below a specific speed.

Wouldn't you want the bell to swing only when ringing the bell?  If so, that's all taken care of by the mode being discussed.

@Norton posted:

Rod, the mechanical part is pretty easy actually. I just drilled a hole in cab front and installed an eyelet in the dome. The motor is mounted in the cab roof. In the engine I did fitting the extra boards took much longer as I had to fit them in the tender and use a different tether with more conductors.
As far as using a bell coil like Lionel did I believe they may be out of stock. Simple coil but tedious to make your own.

If you watch any more of Laurie’s videos he has animated most all of the train crew. I still want to do a fireman shoveling coal. Just have to figure out a good way to trigger it, likely the front coupler signal.

Pete

This thread is generating lots of cool ideas. Pete, I especially like the idea of mounting the motor in the cab roof and operating the bell with a length of piano wire. Should look pretty realistic.

Rather than all the razzle-dazzle circuitry you mentioned earlier, what would be wrong with using the little-used front coupler TMCC circuit in the R2LC for activation? The only addition needed would be a small latching relay circuit to keep the motor energized until the coupler button is pushed again. You would also need a fixed 3vdc reg and a small pot to make the speed adjustment to closely match the bell sound. Once a good value is found for the pot it could be replaced by a fixed resistor so as to save space. This could all be done on a small circuit board. (DipTrace, here we go) Or could activation be done more simply?

Rod

@Rod Stewart posted:

Rather than all the razzle-dazzle circuitry you mentioned earlier, what would be wrong with using the little-used front coupler TMCC circuit in the R2LC for activation?

The big issue is it's not synchronized with the bell operation.

That would work too Rod but if you are doing this in a Legacy engine you only need the bell board and it would start and stop the motor as long as the bell was ringing. They are not that expensive. In a TMCC engine then alternative methods might be easier depending on how much room you have to work with.
Bell coil driver.

Pete

That's a very affordable board! I would like to look into this mod on my b6! I wonder if it could be combined with a LC+2.0 board.

You need to find out if the serial data is available, that's what the bell board needs.  Not sure if the LC+ 2.0 board has a serial data output for the TMCC data.

Depends if the LC+2 puts out 9 bit or 8 bit data. The bell board requires 9 bit code. I tried it with an R2LC and it does not respond.

Pete

That's a non-starter than, I'm pretty sure that the LC+ 2.0 would be putting out TMCC 8-bit data, I'd be surprised if it had 9-bit data.

That's a bummer. Too bad it couldn't be synced to the bell sound signal by detecting current in the speaker wire. I imagine all the other sounds would interfere though. The bell would become a gymnast haha

I believe decoding the serial data is the only realistic way of making the bell mod work.