tools, materials & knowledge for model makers
All of the different forms of electric motors and solenoid motors. If you’ve made a solenoid motor or are selling a kit to make an electric motor of some form then drop me a line and show it off on these pages editor@glue-it.com
Some solenoid motors have a core and attract / repel the connecting rod from one end. Other solenoid motors have an arrangement similar to an engine where the rod runs through the core of the windings. This is very similar to a piston and cylinder arrangement.
Designed as I went along, optimised the solenoid motor and now have the Solenoid Tractor running. The tractor sounds and looks very much like a Field Marshall, the single cylinder engine being replicated by the heavy permanent magnets in the moving piston solenoid. OK, it’s not fully painted, some areas have been left in undercoat. … Read more
Solenoid tractor gears or more precisely the connecting of the rotational output from the motor to the wheels. Accomplished using 1.5 mod brass gears machined using the Genmitsu 3018-pro cnc machine. In the first part of this build I made a solenoid that generated 5x the force of the original motor. I then created an … Read more
Sometimes I have to build something that is different and in my head, this time a solenoid tractor. Firstly I needed to make a more powerful solenoid motor. Solenoid Motor The original model engine, designed to be a take on the horizontal steam engine. The solenoid armature running as a piston through the centre of … Read more
Henk Kaan started with the plans for the solenoid motor, from these he modified and improved the design: The drawings are clear, and the rest was “improving by doing”. The microswitch you used seems to be smaller than the switch that I could get. Therefore I looked for a new position for the switch. The … Read more
Confining the magnetic field of the solenoid motor stator is a significant improvement. The force increases and hence the rotational speed increases. This is the first of a number of improvements to the solenoid motor. However, as you can see from this video it is a significant improvement: Here I have just used 0.9mm thick … Read more
Having built a number of these motors, my thoughts have turned to improving the solenoid motor. The single piston solenoid motor runs very smoothly using a single 9V battery. However, when I moved to the next motor I made some force measurements with the armature and stator. The force was just 0.22N for this small … Read more
When designing the V-Twin solenoid I thought I should try and improve the solenoid. One area of particular concern was that for this one I used small permanent magnets in the armature, useful as it means I can make the engine double acting, but the downside is that it only acts over half the stroke … Read more
After making a solenoid motor in a couple of afternoons in the workshop I thought I should go for something rather more sophisticated. I wondered what a Solenoid V-Twin Harley Davidson motor would be like? One of the first objectives was to measure and improve the force developed by the solenoid. This would then allow … Read more
This is a simple homemade solenoid motor. This has ball bearings for all of the rotating joints. A cam with 2 lobes operates on the roller on the micro-switch and excites the coil when the piston is in the centre of it’s travel. The cylinder and piston are both machined from ebony with small permanent … Read more