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This is my rendition of a cable car. It is not modelled
after any specific car, more of a general amalgamation of them
all. A cable car is a caboose like item that grips the moving
cable that runs between tracks. Kind of like a tow rope on a ski
hill. This particular car is meant to be modelled after the purely
mechanical era. All the lights on board are kerosene fuelled.
Toss in some creative license and here you have it. :-)
You will notice a lot of Star Wars elements in this
design. I'd been wanting to create a cable car for some time to
work with my Mindstorms automated station design but found I could
never get the roof just right. That was all solved with the droid
fighter. The wings make the perfect roof! You may also notice
the driver and seats from the flash speeder set and the front
and back railings from the desert skiff.
Much of this design was influenced by my total lack
of brown bricks. It was a constant give-and-take as I adjusted
my design to fit my increasingly diminishing supply of brown.
Since most cable cars do not turnaround I had to make the ends
look the same. The cable grabber control stick is on the railing
and is what the driver uses to control the rate of speed. The
other handle next to the front/back railing is the brake.
I originally built this model from the top down. The
challenge arose when it came time to attach the 9 V motor to the
base. The 9 V motor has a large stem protruding from the top.
This forced me to raise the entire model to accommodate this stem.
I'm not entirely happy with how the motor is attached. Once I've
accumulated more brown pieces I will make another attempt at it.
At the time the roof was a considerable challenge considering
my shortage of bricks. You may be able to tell from the picture
that I had to use many small brown plates whereas one large what
would have been a lot easier. The roof is held together by a jigsaw
puzzle approach. It is ultimately attached by the underside to
the sides.
I quite enjoyed making this model and find, for some reason, that the more limited I am in my building material limitations the better my models.
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