15 replies to this topic

[Peter]

The drive terminal for this lift is very compact. It is a 1995 Doppelmayr. The top terminal has no enclosure and i'm not exactly sure where the engine is. I think it might be on top. Anyone know for sure? I have never seen this Doppelmayr design before.

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[Vincen]

Skier, on Mar 11 2006, 11:21 PM, said:

The drive terminal for this lift is very compact. It is a 1995 Doppelmayr. The top terminal has no enclosure and i'm not exactly sure where the engine is. I think it might be on top. Anyone know for sure? I have never seen this Doppelmayr design before.

Perhaps engine is under ground but I don't think, it's probably at the other terminal of the lift !

Vincèn

[Peter]

Nope, I don't see it there either!

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[Vincen]

Skier, on Mar 11 2006, 11:32 PM, said:

Nope, I don't see it there either!

Right, on that side it's only tensionning system. So engine is definitively on the other side at top, so engine is under ground and transmission of power is done through the axe. It would explain the little pulley you can see below the main pulley. It's used to get real speed of lift and get a better regulation of speed ;)

Vincèn

[Peter]

I really don't think it's a vault drive either. There was no building underneath and it did not seem like it was built up on a big mound.

This post has been edited by Skier: 11 March 2006 - 02:40 PM

[Vincen]

Skier, on Mar 11 2006, 11:39 PM, said:

I really don't think it's a vault drive either. There was no building underneath and it did not seem like it was built up on a big mound.

I looked again at picture of top and I definitively can tell you engine is at top side, for both previous reason explained and also because emergency brake is on that side, so engine is there as brake is always placed on same axe that engine ;)

Vincèn

[sseguin613]

The bottom terminal and the double chair design both make it a Poma chairlift. The bottom terminal is the Z-Terminal (designed for lifts with a top drive layout) Check on the poma website, they have a picture of that exact bottom terminal and the double chairs.

Sorry i may be wrong about that, it looks very much like the Z-Terminal that poma uses on Alpha Fixed Grip chairlifts with the drive at the top, but the chair says Doppelmayr on the number sticker. So i'm puzzled. Their bottom return terminal looks very much like Poma Z-terminal.

[SkiBachelor]

This lift works a lot like some of the early YAN high-speed quads. The device that you can see on top of the bullwheel is what turns the bullwheel while the motor is inside the terminal structure. Of course I'm not sure how this actually works but it's truely unique.

[skiersage]

It might be possible that this lift is hydrostatic although not very many are.
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The grey gearbox on the bottom of the bullwheel is what drives the lift although the actual motor is in the building on the left of the picture.

The snowghost lift a schweitzer looks to have the same setup. It has a vault drive although there is no drive shaft connecting the vault to the bullwheel. Icould be wrong if the motor is hiding in the terminal covering.

Either way you can see the hoses that connect the gearbox to the motor on both lifts.

[Peter]

sseguin613, That chair is 100% doppelmayr. The chairs are just skinny versions of Doppelmayr quads. It has Doppelmayr towers, bullwheels, and terminals.

[Jonni]

This chair is not 100% a hydrostatic drive. It is in fact 100% Doppelmayr. The drive is located inside the support structure of the top terminal. The motor is basically in the middle of the structure and the gearbox is mounted directly to the motor, which is either directly mounted to the bottom of the bullwheel, or indirectly connect through a series of belts or a shaft. The reason I say that this drive isn't completely hyrdrostatic is because the evac probably is setup as a hydrostatic drive so that a grooming machine can power the lift rather then an auxillary engine. If it was 100% hyrdostatic, the terminal would be even smaller as most of the time the hyrdraulic pump and control system is set behind the lift shack to minimize noise.

Since this lift is a double chair and most likely doesn't have much length to it, the lift most likely didn't require a full fledged drive and this setup was more economical to the ski area as a space saving lift. The visual impact, and noise impact of this style lift is significantly lower, and it is easier to work on because all of the working machinery is at ground level.

Here is the Poma version of the same terminal just with the tensioning at the top. The motor, gearbox and service brake are housed in the unit right under the bullwheel.

[liftmech]

What you are looking at here is probably a direct-driven bullwheel. I'm not certain quite how the drive works but basically the electric motor is coupled directly to the bullwheel with no intermediate shafts, belting, or even a gearbox. It's got to be a pretty low-horsepower application. The evac drive is a standard hydrostatic setup; in Jonni's picture you can see the small electric motor running a hydraulic pump for that particular unit.

[Peter]

It is 2000 ft long, with 638 vertical feet and a 125 horsepower motor. So it isn't that low of horsepower.

[liftmech]

Compared to 1200 HP it is Come to think of it, I've seen this setup on fixed quads and fixed sixes. So perhaps it will run higher horsepower anyway.

[Jonni]

Just checked the Doppelmayr world book for 1995 installs and, even though it doesn't look it, the lift is in fact a vault drive.

[Allan]

Could it maybe be an angle drive (and just listed it as a vault) - with the electric motor being beside the drive tower somewhere? Like this T-Bar?

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