Bricks is a question and answer site for LEGO® and building block enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Hi there I am trying to see if it is possible to connect the Ferris Wheel AND the Winter Village Carousel to one Power Functions motor.
Is this possible? Does anyone have a link to a video perhaps of someone who has done this? I could not find one on Youtube myself. Or perhaps a schematic?
As an addition to Ambo100's very nicely detailed answer, I'd like to add one more option: If either of the two things you are powering might suffer from friction (or perhaps a child holding it still), the provided solutions result in a lot of torque on the motor and axles, which in turn could lead to damage to those components (although LEGO motors are designed to switch off if put under too much stress). To avoid this, you could use a differential with in the white box in Ambo100's picture, like in this picture:
The motor would connect to the axle in the bottom right (with the big tan gear), and you would connect the Ferris Wheel and the Winter Carrousel to the left and right "output" axles. A differential splits the output power of the motor over the two axles and keeps the summed rotation of both axles constant even if one axle experiences resistance (the other axle would simply start rotating faster).
Regardless of the models, you can always connect a single motor to one or more models by splitting the axle using (for example) angular wheels or bevel gears.
I covered two ways of transmitting horizontal to vertical torque here using worm gears and knob wheels on a previous question about transmitting horizontal torque to vertical.
jncraton also has a good demonstration of using bevel gears to achieve the same thing, which I think would work better in this case, although it really depends what parts you have lying around or are willing to purchase.
The principles also apply here except you need to use three axles/joints instead of two. If your models are further apart you can use extra axles connected to standard Technic axle connectors or u-joints (Universal Joints) which can be used at small angles.
Your transmission might end up looking like this. The red axle provides the drive from the motor and rotates the green and blue axles for your two separate models.
You may also wish to adjust the gear ratios directly at the transmission box or on the models themselves to get the speed more realistic. You may want the Ferris Wheel to rotate slower than the carousal for example.
