Four Phoenixes Rising From The Ashes

As many of you read in my last blog entry, I had an unfortunate accident involving two fantastic Intermountain SD45T-2s taking a "Leap Of No Faith" off the top of my layout to the hardwood floor below.  Initial visual inspection looked as though I may have avoided much damage, but after putting them back on the rails, neither decided to run.

Well, last night, they rose again.  Ready to start hauling strings of ore cars around a 36x80" hollow core door.  In addition, I decided two other pesky locos needed some attention as well.

Last night, after entertaining my dog enough that he decided to curl up and gnaw on a bone, I dug out the two fallen soldiers as well as my two Athearn Canadian National SD70Is which haven't been running all that great (and they are practically new) and went to work.

 I decided to start with the Athearns as I figured the trouble I was having with them would be easier to fix.  I posted a message over in the diesels forum (http://www.nscale.net/forums/modeling/diesels/2008/03/12/remotoring-athearn-sd75i) about remotoring the Athearns with a Kato motor or something similar, and received some replies about them being very much over greased.  Since the solution seemed simple (clean the nasty things out) I decided to give it a try.  This was the first time I had ever bothered taking apart a loco before, and to my surprise, although very cramped on the inside, the mechanisms for the Athearns were surprisingly straight forward.  Much like the others who responded in my forum thread, they were WAY over greased, so I went to work cleaning them out.  The hardest part of this entire exercise was probably just getting everything back together.  The Athearns have a small plastic piece on each end that insulates the frame, but it fits right in with the pickups for the wheels.  Getting all those little small parts back together proved to be an exercise in patience, but I managed to get them back together without too many four-letter words.  Some, but not too many. 

After cleaning all the muck out of the worm gears and getting blobs of lube out of the trucks, one of the Athearns had a definite improvement in performance.  The other one though is still running rough.  I have a feeling the motor contacts might not be contacting the frame too well, so tonight I will again send it under the knife to see what happens.

So after the confidence-building with the Athearns, on we moved to the Intermountains...

To start, I just took off the shells and threw them on the tracks to see if the motors would run, if they were picking up electricity, etc.  The first one was getting juice to the circuit board as the light would come on, but the motor wouldn't spin and had no juice.  Uh oh.  The other one had a truck pop out when it hit the floor, and after putting it back in, the motor would turn, but it would fight itself and wouldn't move.  Uh oh part two.

I started with the one that was getting juice but seemed as if it was fighting itself.  I loosened the frame enough to get both trucks out and then began re-seating them in making sure the worm gears meshed up well with the trucks.  After I putting it back together, which was much simpler than the Athearn as there wasn't nearly the amount of small parts to get together, I threw it on the tracks, crossed my fingers, and slowly opened the throttle.  To my surprise, the motor began to turn and it started its slow crawl down the tracks.  After upping the juice a little bit, I left it to run for a few minutes and began inspecting the other one.

I completely disassembled the second one down to just the motor and frame, checked everything, then reassembled it.  The results for round two were not quite as enthusiastic as the first.  The light still went on, but nothing happened.  It was getting a bit late, the dog decided he had to go outside (I wonder how long it would take to toilet-train a dog....) so I delt with the pooch, then called it a night.

This morning I was still bothered enough that before I hit the road to work, I decided I'd check one other thing.  If it was just the motor not getting juice, there must be a contact issue with the circuit board.  So I again took it apart and found one of the motor contacts was ever so slightly bent down too far.  So a quick bend out with the tip of a small screwdriver, reassembly, and back on the tracks it went.  Sure enough, that was the trick.  It started running just as if nothing had ever happened!

Both sets of engines (Athearn and Intermountain which is an Atlas mechanism) were both very straight-forward to take apart and put back together.  What I thought would be a surprisingly daunting task turned out to just require some patience and a steady hand when dealing with some rather small parts.  Such is life with N scale I guess!