I put my trash cans on rails and now they move automaticaly! (Trash Train)

hi everybody my name is Max maker and this week I'm building a trash train actually I built a whole summer and this trash train will move my trash cans from in front of the house all the way back into the garden where they are not visible from the outside and I've put everything on Rails first they were in this little chat here which doesn't look very good and it wasn't practical at all but this area is going to become a small driveway so these trash cans would be in the way so I had to move them over to the other side of the building I've got plenty of space there but it's not that easy to reach them back there because it's a grassy area and it's quite narrow and of course the grass gets wet and muddy so you really need something like this pavement right here but that's a lot of manual labor which I didn't fancy but I never built a train before so for why not do that I like working with steel much more than with brakes it's also lighter and less material that you need so yeah this is the path that I chose and I'm really happy with it it was a really fun project and at the end of the day it's just the best solution it's much easier it's easier accessible also to the older folks living in this building and maybe it's even a product I might be able to sell one day so this is kind of the prototype for that tried some flame bending that didn't work uh the tip it just didn't move enough so cutting the slots was the way to go we concreted these in but just very slightly because we also didn't want to seal the driveway because uh sealing off areas where the water can drain isn't good isn't good for the environment and here in Germany they're also quite strict about this so this doesn't seal anything it keeps the nature intact and it still works and it's functional and you can't see the trash cans which is also a thing we didn't want we can't just put them in front of the house it doesn't look good so moving them out of the way is the most practical idea and this is the hydraulic Bender that I bought for making these curves um and that was super helpful because otherwise it is difficult to control your bends if you do like with your body weight and some levers and here are the first two platforms these are laser cut from one piece of Steel and then powder coated and we moved some concrete to make these Point foundations and they work really well this is the locomotive at least the first version is just a windshield wiper motor and some chain drive and it drives these two wheels so it's two wheel drive and here the electronics it's an Arduino a motor controller and two parties that changed the acceleration the speed just for troubleshooting and then this remote it's a cheap remote for like 20 euros and that worked surprisingly ways well straight away uh the only issue was that it didn't have enough grip especially if you add more cans to this and as I said we have seven not because we produce a lot of trash it's because of recycling and also because they only get picked up once a month and here you have the little antenna and actually I found out you have to pull it out to full length to get good signal but more on that later because we had some signal problems the track was done pretty quickly and we added some fine all the way around it there's five now because this is like it's like grass but it doesn't grow as tall and you can walk on it and it's good for the environment better than grass certainly foreign tests were really promising it's working I can see that the cancer staying on there and it's moving along it's just not going uphill here it's going downhill which is fine but uphill the train doesn't have enough grip uh and yeah that's something I just didn't think about that the train needs to be super heavy so I need to make some improvements first of all this shaft I find it too small I'm using a bigger one this is 15 millimeters now so I need new bearing blocks while I'm at it I'm also exchanging this for a belt drive because this is too noisy in my opinion and this wheel gives me really nice traction it works quite well but I can already feel there's a Groove wearing into it so I'm exchanging it for this piece of solid steel that's what I'm doing now yeah the section of track that it's riding on is just too thin it's just six millimeters of Steel and here I'm adding the shaft to this Precision device and that way I can make sure that the wheel is on there 90 degrees perfectly straight and I just put on with super glue then I welded it and here I'm truing up the surface to make it look nice and this mini Mill is really struggling with anything you do with it and now I change it also to these belt drives and I added a lot of these scrub screws and I also made the bar a little bit flat for these grub screws to hold on to the bar and that worked quite well but we had some other issues later and we changed it again and this is the new motor much more powerful than the windshield wiper motor and this awesome gearbox this is like from an industrial motor and has a hex key and the cool thing is it has a 15 to 1 reduction so much more power this little key I made for it I just put a Groove in there with the angle grinder and then I super glued a piece of Steel in there and I'm just moving it out and that fits perfectly into the gearbox and I'm quite happy with that that worked out much better than I thought and I'm just using one of these rubber hoses to connect the gearbox to the motor because it's flexible and that way they don't have to be aligned perfectly this is the shaft before I cut it down for the gearbox itself um and I made it a little bit narrower to fit these belt gears and I weld this on for now but then I discovered I can also buy them as taper locks which are much better because you can get them on there perfectly concentrically and they get screwed down really tightly and they grip the shaft really well even without a keyway so this is the belt drive it's a dual wheel drive so with these changes the drive has more torque but it also needs more weight to put that torque onto the track so it took all the rubbish that I had put it into box section and weld it up just to create some weights because especially when the train is wet it has very very little grip something that I never had with any other project before I just didn't think about it you need so much weight and that's why these trains were like 50 tons or something like that so this is where we ended up and this is the point where we're going to change things up completely again everything that is black is just pure weight so it's just a lot of Steel that we bolted down everywhere we've got a really nice big motor got a nice gearbox and this is going really well um the belt drive has enough uh yeah a torque to to twist everything and to turn these wheels it's just one issue these wheels that don't have enough grip I would need something like polyurethane Wheels but then the polyurethane on this really thin metal they would just rub off and read a break you see here that black line that's where the rails are so probably urethane is just too soft and this is yeah not enough grip so what do we do we need a rack and pinion gear so this motor has to be flipped over 90 degrees so then we can drive directly on the rack and pinning gear so this is the third iteration of the train and now the motor is swinging on this Arc and that will push the gear into the red track that will be welded to the track and for that I cut this cut out so it has a path to travel and actually move into the track and I will 3D print the gear and bolt it to this pulley these two set screws they pull the inner part in and out and that way it clamps around the shaft and it's a really good connection and I couldn't get a gear with a Taper Lock but I can get these pulleys everywhere in Germany steel gears are loud and expensive so I 3D printed mine it's much cheaper it's just six euros and I can play around with the gear sizes right so this looks quite complicated and it kind of is but the old information is that this thing right here pushes this gear down here towards this rail that will be underneath here and I added this little thing uh it's one of these Snappers and I could pull this let me do it with both hands oh with one hand oh yeah now it's locked so now we can put it on the rail without this being engaged otherwise we can't get it on there and what's the rails the card is on the rail we can pull this and it re-engages really simple still waiting for a belt right here and for a slightly longer shaft because this is not low enough at the moment and while I'm waiting for the parts I'm welding on the rack to the track uh with my cool welder and it's really easy you know welding stuff on is just so much faster than bolting anything you don't have to measure a lot you just put the stick welder in there and and it will secure it somehow I'm not very good at it but it's easy and it's working obviously the train also needs some cover to keep all of this stuff from rusting too much so I made this cover or I had it made by a steel manufacturer so that's the four Federation in the fourth test run and the rack and pinion gear has so much traction it's incredible this works really well and I think this is the way to go so now the transmission is working I can finish all the rest of the stuff here on the inside I put this butyl tape and that damage the vibrations a lot on a lot of my projects whenever I use some steel panels like this yeah really good and to hold this on temporarily I'm using these clicko pins uh really cool these are like temporary rivets and then I riveted everything on of course with my zipper Firebird Riveter uh that tool is just amazing it's so quick so easy and I use a lot of rivets nowadays also for work and this actually is work because I'm building this obviously it's a fun project but I also think it might be a viable product so hopefully future I can offer this and sell it I need to make a commercial version obviously but we have so many older folks in Germany and they really need something to help them with something like this not everybody but some might find this really useful that they don't have to walk as fast and they don't have to bring out the trash cans by by hand and to power the train I'm using one of these cast batteries from Metabo these are really nice batteries I really like the system it's new and it has everything built into it so why build my own battery the cool thing is they don't just power the cordless drills from Metabo but also from other companies like gazipa they just use the same battery and that's really convenient this is a rivet Setter so the train runs on batteries and the batteries get charged through these five connectors on the bottom of the housing this is the other side of the connector so these are spring-loaded stainless steel rods stainless steel Springs these are not stainless steel and they push against the connector and they all push in individually so hopefully at the end when the whole thing pushes against them everything will have good contact this is the battery charger and it has everything built into it so I don't have to modify anything there I just need to extend these cables to this connector right here the connector got bolted down to a thick piece of Steel on the track that I welded to it and on top I'm adding this roof to keep the rain and some of the rodents out um and that's the charging done basically these are the end stops and conveniently they fit perfectly into these slots right here so we can adjust them a little bit and we'll put we'll put metal rods into the ground between the tracks one here and one at this location but undefined so that way um the train knows when it has reached the end but I soon discovered that that is a problem because when the sender is driving along it can just jump over the metal rod and behind that metal rod it thinks oh I haven't reached the end so I keep going so it needs to be somehow latching and needs to be really reliable as well to stop so instead I'm using a much longer bar and an end switch and at longer bar you know it reaches it and then it knows okay I'm still on it and it can slowly de-accelerate and still stay on that end stop so I'm using these mechanical end stops instead because the inductive ones they had a clearance of two millimeters so more than two millimeters and it wouldn't register and less than two millimeters it would just crash into the end stop rail This is the End stop Rail and has a little ramp at the beginning I welded on two of these end stop rails one is for slowing it down and the other one is an actual end stop the train has some momentum if it's going at full speed so you need to slow it down first over a longer distance and then it slowly has to keep moving forward until it actually reaches the connectors at the end so that's what the second end stop is for or the actual end stop and that is working really well it's really a good thing that I had so much space left over underneath the track to hide the gear and also the end stops and now it's working really reliably it keeps going at quite a speed then it slows down and then at the end it really just creeps forwards until it stops completely the train wouldn't look correct without these lights at the front and it's also good at night to see if it actually has recognized the signal from the remote I also had to play with these bearings here these are the guide Wheels to keep it on the track at first I had it made from steel but now it's plastic and they're far less noisy also these hose clamps that connect the motor to the gearbox I had to exchange them for these clamp star clamps because the whole clamps you can't just put too much force on them but here you can really cinch them down and that way it never slips quite happy with how this power transmission works now and after adding the enclosure I didn't have any more signals so I had to put on an external antenna and that's of that issue but now it's working really reliable and I learned so much in this project the whole traction issue of the wheel slipping you know the force you need to push along these cards because you think you know something on Rails is really easy to push but turns out you still need about 30 kilograms of thrust to push these along and that I think for me was the best part of this you know learning all these new issues and how to solve them I think that that will help me in a lot of projects in the future um and it's also a very functional setup at the end of the day because you press the button you walk outside and the train just magically appears you also can't see any of the tracks because it just looks like the border of the pavement here and it's also working really well in the winter and I don't have to snow shovel this area because the train can just move over the snow so the Prototype was a complete success and is functional and hopefully I can build on this in the future to make a commercial version and I want to thank the Way Out West Channel he's from Ireland and he's building a whole train system on his property and he gave me the inspiration to build my own the two setups are very different but they both serve the same goal of moving stuff about so I really like YouTube for that that you can learn so much stuff from other people and I want to thank you for watching and for liking and subscribing my videos and of course if you have some thoughts just leave them in the comments so thanks for watching Everybody bye bye

Channel: Max Maker

Views: 4,734,426

Keywords: Trash Train, Train, Railroad, backyard railroad, garden railroad, garden train, automated trashcans, self driving trash cans, garbage can train, automation, arduino, diy train, BTS7960, Metabo CAS, CAS, Metabo, Gesipa, Making, Instructables, Model Train, DIY Railway, Way Out west

Id: VhYEOG9LOIk

Length: 14min 48sec (888 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 27 2022