Repairing the Tomica 'Charge Play' park-o-mat,

Well chaps, as alluded to in one of my other posts, I managed to get hold of a Tomica Town 'Charge Play' car park.



I've nicknamed these kind of machines (they are indeed a real-world thing and not just a cool Tomica accessory) 'park-o-mats' because they're much the same principle as a launderette/laundromat in that one goes to the machine, parks your car on a lift bay, and then you pay the parking fee to operate the machine, which moves the car to an empty rack space and parks it for you.

There have been many variations of this system designed, here in the UK they're not common at all compared to the typical multi-storey parking complexes where you drive into the parking area, whereas I understand overseas they are much more common, including Japan.

Incidentally however, a UK company did build an impressively large one of these machines, namely the Marryatt-Scott lift company (now a part of the multinational KONE lift group). 

Through their Kenyan branch in Nairobi, they installed such a machine there which was part-made by Von Roll of Germany, which while originally fully-automated, allegedly now runs [assuming it's still there] in a mix of automated and 'bodged' manual where basically any broken parts are over-ridden and controlled by human attendants for that 100% authentic death-trap experience; Safety-first, am I right? 








http://www.elevatorbobs-elevator-pics.com/naiken.html - External site with more pictures and information about the 'Nairobi' machine, which is now a feat of homebrew engineering if ever there was one LOL  .


Anyway, onto the repair aspect - this one's in superb condition save for one key thing - The lift, which is supposed to gently rise on a push-button control thanks to an in-built clockwork motor shoots up violently instead.

Now reading reviews of this particular unit led me to several Amazon reviews claiming the same issue of an uncontrolled lift happened to theirs. It seems this might then be a common problem, and I think I may have deduced why - Read on to find out.

So spoiler alert, this is going to be a multi-part set of posts. Simple reason, this first one is covering my investigation and diagnosis of the fault, plus a breakdown of the design and why it's actually quite clever, but also flawed enough that it definitely has a higher than average risk of breakdowns.



So basically there are 2 parts to this machine, the lift tower and base, and the parking structure. 

Both seperate, and the parking structure is actually a stackable module akin to the Plarail risers, meaning if you have a lot of these, they stack on top of one another to make a neat Tomica rack, although the lift will only reach the first 3 levels of parking.





The lift tower is a very simple structure, but one that has, brace yourselves, 12 screws to completely dismantle. Fortunately there's no proprietary stuff here, all Phillips heads, and you begin by removing the tower from the base, then dismantling the tower.

A pitfall to watch for is the lift 'buttons', which like all good TOMY designs, have nice tense and tiny springs stuffed behind them that you need to make sure you don't lose, particularly when removing them and they shoot into your face... Guilty as charged.




The next stage, which is shockingly easy, is removing the motor. This is literally just a friction-fit in the moving yellow housing which travels up and down the tower.



Now, for the diagnosis. It goes without saying that the obvious culprit here is the motor unit, which is a typical off-the-shelf clockwork car motor, a type I've seen used before.

My suspicion? Given TOMY makes Choro-Q pullback cars, I'm going to bet this is either the same, or a very similar motor to that in a Choro-Q but I'll investigate later.

The drive cogs attached to the axle have no cracks and are not damaged, so that only leaves the clockwork motor, which we can safely assume has a faulty gearbox as it is unable to release it's power slowly.

A gear puller is your friend here, because you'll need to retain the yellow drive cogs, and the axle from the motor.

Now after opening the motor, which given its tiny size was a real pain, I discovered the culprit - The teeth on one of the tiny motor cogs had sheared off in several places. 

This is where my design critique comes in. TOMY are known for making very good mechanical designs that are simple to repair, and in their defence, this is one of them. However, most are not relying on a component that for this job has a high risk of failure, and this is why:

The design is predicated on the idea that you wind the lift down into it's 'loaded' position and leave it there until you load the lift and press a button. 

This means the motor is always under tension, and thus so are the tiny cogs in said motor. 

It is therefore basically inevitable that under constant load, the cog teeth will eventually shear off due to the pressure from the clockwork spring acting to push the motor forwards, while being held back by the lift button's catch.

This means all that force is being transmitted through these tiny cogs under load, hence the breakage.


Sooo, with that slightly technical ramble, what's my diagnosis?

New motor, that's it. It's an off-the-shelf part so realistically it shouldn't be hard to get a new one, and all I should need to do is refit the drive gears to the new motor and then reassemble the entire unit. Did I say off-the-shelf? Why pray-tell is it so hard to find a place selling pull-back motors? At the rate I'm going I may just have to score some pound-shop pull-back cars and harvest their motors, assuming they'd be compatible. I need to look closely at the design TOMY have used here as I think it may actually be a proprietary design, or at the very least, a specific design I need to look for. It's not a Choro-Q design, that I have confirmed [see below.



For now anyway, I'm going to safely store the parts to be repaired, then reassemble the whole unit to sit on my layout as a display item until I can get it functional again, which I'm pretty confident I can






EDIT - Hoo boy, I was wrong about it being a Choro-Q clockwork motor [different shape entirely] but you know what I did find on my search for a replacement motor?

A whole line of products called 'Motor Choro-Q', and if you're now thinking 'surely they weren't insane enough to make an electronic motorised road system with smaller moving parts than B/O Tomica/Motor Tomica/Tomica World', well the madlads at Takara [these dropped prior to the TT merger] have you covered - I dread to think how difficult these things must be to repair considering their size, but sure enough these are a thing, seemingly Takara attempting their own take on the Motor Tomica system.





They even oddly resemble Motor Tomica's concept of modular roads with mechanically operated 'destinations', several of which are strikingly similar in design and concept to those of Motor Tomica to begin with [see the pictures of the Petrol Station and Traffic Light which both resemble their Motor Tomica equivalents].

[Super]

Very detailed Guide and info P-Man Thanks

Well, I'm one step closer to finding a motor, I think. One of the problems I've got here is that I'm not sure if I need a motor with specific gearing that runs especially slowly, but I don't think I do? Either way, for £1 this has to be worth a go

[Super]

Wow, that must have taken a lot of searching.

Yeah it did 😅

Kitronic was probably one of the few places I had left to search, they're basically like RadioShack but mainly sell to professional clients like schools, industry etc., but they do sell to consumers too. 

They do specialise (as the name implies) in electronic and engineering based kits, and these parts are suggested for, not surprisingly, building pull-back cars. 

It looks close to what I'm thinking of although I'll need to measure the diameter of the axle shaft on the dead motor to make sure any replacement motor will fit the axle removed from the dead motor.

I'm still also not totally convinced that the original is not a proprietary motor design with a considerable number of gears (there were 3) to reduce the output speed on the axle, but we shall see. As it stands, googling 'Tomy pullback motor' got me only pictures of ChoroQ and other TOMY clockwork toys, so I'm no closer to determining a specific model number or part number either which may help the search.

On the subject of 'Park-o-mats' while I'm deciding how to proceed with the repair of the 'Charge Play' type, I figured I should give honourable mention to a TOMY classic that's been around since at least the 1970's....






This design is [in my mind] the quintissential model representation of a 'Park-o-mat' type structure as it captures the typical format of a central lift/elevator component which serves a number of 'rack' levels to pick up and collect cars.

I have been looking for one of these recently, however to find an original is difficult and expensive.

Good news is, this design, or variations of it, is somewhat common in the UK because it's been copied and modified to death by Chinese bootleggers, so it's somewhat possible to find these clones being sold at flea markets and discount stores. This one below sells for about £20 on eBay UK but I'm convinced I can go to a local town which has a plethora of stores selling cheap and often fake merchandise, as well as a large general/flea market and find one for less, so maybe I'd do well to go exploring.



Incidentally, if I were to get hold of one of these, I'd likely make my own stickers and decoration cards to replace the ones included; Depending on the colour of the plastic used, I'd be tempted to decorate it with the logos/designs of a petrol company to make it look more city-authentic for a layout? This one has a lot of blue and red, so in this case I'd lean towards ESSO or similar branding as blue and red are part of their corporate colours. Gotta love their use of the old FIAT logo though which has now been changed to say 'AUTO', as if that'll dodge copyright or something lmao


I also decided to trawl the home of everything legitimate, Alibaba.com, and of course, there's fakes of the Charge Play park-o-mat because why wouldn't there be? 



This appears to be part of a 'range' made up entirely of ripped-off Tomica designs, I'd dare say i'm tempted by the idea of buying a fake one to harvest it's motor parts for my legitimate model, but I really don't suppose the parts are of high quality, or even will work properly when it arrives  Guess there's no shortcut to just buying a decent pullback motor.

[Super]

Incidentally, if I were to get hold of one of these, I'd likely make my own stickers and decoration cards to replace the ones included; Depending on the colour of the plastic used, I'd be tempted to decorate it with the logos/designs of a petrol company to make it look more city-authentic for a layout? This one has a lot of blue and red, so in this case I'd lean towards ESSO or similar branding as blue and red are part of their corporate colours. Gotta love their use of the old FIAT logo though which has now been changed to say 'AUTO', as if that'll dodge copyright or something lmao

Thats a great idea P-Man, I would like to see that 👍

@Super - Guess you will eventually lol, I went with the one on eBay after an excruciatingly long session trawling AliExpress, AliBaba and other sites to find the same design for slightly cheaper - Couldn't find it. 

I could have swore this design was once basically the typical bargain garage one would find here in the UK, but maybe not so much now? Anyway, I put in for next-day delivery so maybe i'll be lucky and I'll have it by tomorrow, at the very least then I can make scans of the backing-cards and sticker sheets so I can start to make my own custom designs on the computer. 

I've decided pretty much conclusively to go with my 'ESSO' concept since looking into it, ESSO was a common Tomica garage brand anyway prior to the 1990's [I understand this is because ESSO Japan became part of ENEOS, hence why ENEOS is now a common partner with Tomica for branded garage sets]. 

That, and here in the UK ESSO is a common fuel brand also, because that is the brand by which ExxonMobil sells petrol here, with a history spanning back to the early days of British motoring under the 'Pratts Motor Spirit' brand of the 'Anglo American Oil Company' founded in 1899.

It was a somewhat complicated licencing situation for Tomica petrol stations in the 1990's as here on BPT there's been evidence of Nisseki, JOMO and ESSO branded 90's Tomica petrol stations. 

My research has shown that Nisseki and ESSO Japan by the 1990's were actually one and the same company [Nippon Oil] with the ESSO name merely being a licence held by Nisseki for branding up petrol stations and selling Exxon/ESSO products in Japan [managed seperately from Nisseki however], while JOMO was a seperate company altogether [Japan Energy/Japan Mining] which is now also a part of ENEOS due to a merger in the 2000's to form 'Shin-Nisseki' trading as ENEOS, with the whole lot now owned by the Mitsubishi general trading company.

However, in the 1990's, all 3 were still legally seperate, hence the 3 designs all getting a release in the Tomica system.

EDIT - Also discovered a couple additional varieties of the Motor Tomica petrol station; COSMO and Shell.

Shell's version was a rarer release at the back-end of Motor Tomica when it was sold as Plaroad in the early 2000s by Tomy, COSMO's was one of the regular variants avaliable during the Motor Tomica era.

COSMO petrol stations are still going strong in Japan, with the COSMO oil company being Japan's third largest refinery operator, while Shell Japan was taken over in 2018 by Idemitsu Oil, marking the end of the Shell brand's presence in Japan as a petrol station operator.

Well, now the customising can begin. The stickers [there's a lot lol ] were on an A3 sheet, but my A4 scanner has a rather nifty 'splice' function to allow you to scan an A4 document in 2 passes, then splice the images together - This sticker sheet was badly creased anyway on arrival and doesn't feel of especially high quality, but my plan now is to edit these then have them printed [for about £7.50] onto a sheet of A3 sticky vinyl which will be of much better quality than what was enclosed.

Same goes for the backing cards, I especially love the lift backing card with it's tasty selection of stock images raided from Google [LOL ] especially the 'car wash' image where inexplicably the car's registration plate reads 'CHRIST'.



Either way, these will be edited too and my plan is to get a high-quality colour print of them at my local post office [50p per A4 sheet], then glue them to some re-used cardboard for stability.



As for the Charge-Play park-o-mat, well that one's hit a dead end almost immediately. Poundland car motors are too large; It has to be a specifically 'slimline' design of pullback motor which frankly I'm not sure isn't some kind of proprietary TOMY design made for this specific unit. I could conceivably buy a bootleg version from Alibaba and hope that maybe the motor in that is a clone of the TOMY design and use that, but I don't really know so for now, back to research.

[Super]

Looking good P-Man