miniature elevators

A couple of weeks ago my sister came to visit and brought one of the elevator shafts and cars along with more door assemblies. We spent the weekend retrofitting doors with the new mechanism, but there was not time to get the car operating in the shaft while she was here. My first idea for driving the car worked fine, but I realized it had a potential drawback. The car is being driven with a stepper motor and a “GT2” timing belt. While the belt is operating well below is rated operating tension, if it should break it would be a disaster since neither the car nor the counter weight has a brake. I decided it would be a really good idea to use a double belt system, so if a belt broke, the other would prevent a crash. Between coming up with a double belt system and wiring up doors, it was only today that I got the car operating again.

The video shows the car in action. The doors are not operating yet since I am waiting for the circuit boards for the controller to be fabricated.

From time to time, I work with my sister, Pat Keck (http://patkeck.com) on animating one of her sculptures. The current project is a Ghost Elevator, which actually contains three approximately 1/10 scale three floor elevators. This means there are 9 miniature sliding elevator doors and a lot of small fussy parts. My sister came up with a door mechanism based on that used in the real deal. Fundamentally it was fine, but she used little hand made Delrin wheels for the door slides riding on brass bar, which proved not to reliably glide and also contained an awful lot of fussy assembly. So I redesigned the glides to use miniature v-groove ball bearings riding on ground drill rod. Since there is very limited space to make things fit, I measured my sister’s door mechanism and put the whole thing into a CAD program (I use TurboCAD). This allowed me to try various options without having to build things. The CAD rendering of the door assembly is below.

Tag: miniature elevators

The Elevator is coming together