Well, after getting home from the dry run of the TCS display, and seeing Eric Kingsley's gate house and sections of wall, I got inspired. So I completely destroyed my gate house, and rebuilt it with a couple things in mind: make it wider, make it more/less ornate (I disliked the style of the old one), try and use tan bricks, and: try and make a better portcullis system. I also copied Eric's wall design (except with blue highlights-- I liked the blue better with the tan... gredy/red/tan didn't look as nice). Here's the results of me building until 2:30 AM Saturday night (2/26/00-2/27/00):



Note the mechanism on the top-- winding the turnstyle will raise the portcullis, but you can only turn it in one direction. As it turns, the lever locks the portcullis in place. Releasing the lever allows the portcullis to fall all the way to the ground (gravity does its job well, actually, it works very consistently)





Here's the mechanism for raising and lowering the gate-- fairly straightforward..

Here's the locking mechanism-- stolen off of the huge Spyrius Robot's arm locking mechanism... :)



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