Some Days...
...it doesn't pay to get out of bed. I'm beginning to think the old mill project is seriously jinxed. First it was the broken light wire; then, somehow I managed to snap the wire to the water wheel motor—right at the motor, leaving no opportunity for repair. Not even ant brain surgery could help. I'd essentially destroyed a twenty-dollar gearhead pager motor.
The only option was to replace it. And in order to do that, owing to how it was designed, I had to tear out and rebuild half of the gear train in situ. I'd sooner do without the animation altogether than attempt to remove the mill from the layout, so I started chopping and tearing; below is the half-gutted mechanism.
Just to make matters more complicated, I had no exact replacement for the motor. I had a similar one, but it didn't like the driver circuit I'd made for the first motor, so I had to build a new driver circuit using a 1.5V regulator, which I had to order online and wait for its delivery.
The problems didn't stop there; when I'd completed the drive train rebuild and installed the new motor (below), the motor ran fine—yet the water wheel refused to turn! I was on the verge of simply smashing everything and building something else to replace the mill when I finally discovered that a little glob of Sculptamold had dropped into the space between the water wheel and the dam, locking it in place.
Then, just to add insult to injury, the new motor is substantially noisier than the old one, which was nearly silent. This one's so noisy in fact that it drove me to separate it from the lighting circuit, which in turn meant making a whole new control panel so that I could add another toggle switch just for the mill. This way people can enjoy the illuminated buildings without having to endure the buzzing whine of the water wheel.
All told, it took nearly a week to make the repairs. What really irks me no end is that I've been making animated devices since practically forever, and this is one of the simplest ones I've built—yet it's given me the most grief. It certainly stands in stark contrast to the home run I hit with the truss bridge! Go figure. Maybe now, after all this time, I can finally install the roof on the mill...?