Moving on, let's have a look at a regular Motor Tomica / Tomica World vehicle. This is Motor Tomica A-07 Mitsubishi Pajero, but (I think) they're all pretty much the same switch mechanism.
This view shows the gear train with the white selector fork on the right.
The next picture shows the white selector fork lifted out. It turns out that the fork and the on-off knob are one integral piece of white plastic. There is no electrical component switch of the kind seen in Terence further back in this thread.
If you have one of these vehicles with a broken-off switch knob, you have to either fabricate a new plastic assembly somehow, or cannibalise a junk vehicle. I have several with this problem, but it's very difficult to imagine how it could have happened. Presumably something caused the mechanism to seize up and the previous owner took extreme measures to try and make the switch move.
Here we see the underside of the vehicle with the undertray removed. The electrical 'on' contact is made by moving the white switch knob down, which moves plate A down so that the bent down part of the plate (above the top of the 'A') slides over the battery terminal extension B.
So in their infinite wisdom Tomy took this simple mechanism with minimal wiring and easy assembly, and replaced it with the nightmare complexity that I found inside Terence. Presumably there was a reason, but on the evidence I've seen it's hard to see what it would have been, unless the problem alluded to above was more prevalent than I'd imagined.
Finally (?), I leave you with this sad scene, reminiscent of the Mojave Desert.
(This post was last modified: 01-14-2025, 11:15 AM by chrisjo.)
This view shows the gear train with the white selector fork on the right.
The next picture shows the white selector fork lifted out. It turns out that the fork and the on-off knob are one integral piece of white plastic. There is no electrical component switch of the kind seen in Terence further back in this thread.
If you have one of these vehicles with a broken-off switch knob, you have to either fabricate a new plastic assembly somehow, or cannibalise a junk vehicle. I have several with this problem, but it's very difficult to imagine how it could have happened. Presumably something caused the mechanism to seize up and the previous owner took extreme measures to try and make the switch move.
Here we see the underside of the vehicle with the undertray removed. The electrical 'on' contact is made by moving the white switch knob down, which moves plate A down so that the bent down part of the plate (above the top of the 'A') slides over the battery terminal extension B.
So in their infinite wisdom Tomy took this simple mechanism with minimal wiring and easy assembly, and replaced it with the nightmare complexity that I found inside Terence. Presumably there was a reason, but on the evidence I've seen it's hard to see what it would have been, unless the problem alluded to above was more prevalent than I'd imagined.
Finally (?), I leave you with this sad scene, reminiscent of the Mojave Desert.
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