Hi all, I am trying to design a fiddle yard to connect to my small switching layout. It will be build out of 9mm strong plywood. The traverse table will be movable because of build in drawer slides. (yellow bars in the pictures). I am still figuring out how to build a locking mechanism for the traverse table. Any suggestion would be welcome. I am not sure whether to use real code 40 rail on pcb ties or just aluminum strips.
How do you plan to move the traverse table? I would use A rack and pinion gear set at each end You could connect the pinion gears with a single driveshaft and drive them with a stepper motor that would allow you to move the transfer table equally at both ends. And the stepper motor would allow you to move /drive the table to align the tracks and keep it from moving out of alignment at the same time.
You could also try using the HS-785 Gear Rack Kit from servo city. Put one of them at each end of the transfer table and use a Maestro Servo controller to control them It would allow you to remotely move the transfer table side to side. Control exactly how far it moves and hold it in place at the same time. Plus with the Maestro if you learn to use the scripts you could add push buttons for each track then have it move and align to what ever track the button is configured to.
Hi Frank if you need some inspirations, look at the site from Alexander Lösch http://www.frankenmodell.de/index.html Hi built some kinds of Fiddleyards with easy and cheap equipment
Thanks for the idea, but I will figure out a manual looking mechnism. When operating a fiddle yard one needs to be close to it anyway.
