tools, materials & knowledge for model makers
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