flying santa

[Brett H.]

I know a few people have a flying santa and reindeer in their display. Would anyone be willing to share how they have santa fly? I have an idea but not sure how to get it all to work together. Your ideas are greatly appreciated. My idea was to use a C channel as the track with wheels that fit inside the channel. The wheels mounted to a piece of flat stock and blow mold santa and reindeer mounted to that. I was thinking of using an older chain driven garage door opener to get santa to "fly" from our neighbors roof to ours. But cant figure out how to activate the garage door opener? still working on ideas but anyones thoughts are appreciated.

[Stingray]

You could activate the opener with a 110v coil relay. Replace the pushbutton that is ushally mounted on the wall with the normally open contacts in the relay. Turn on the relay with one of your channels on the controller.

[heystew]

I did a write-up on our flying sleigh in this post http://forums.lightorama.com/index.php?/topic/19346-rocky-run-christmas-2011-video/#entry183814

the pictures have disappeared, so here it is again.

and the motor assembly (as suggested above, i use two 110v relays to trigger the up and down of the opener).