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].