I am quickly getting fed up with the performance of my American Flyer steam engine. It is a #312, 4-6-2 engine.
I recently replaced the smoke wick and coil and that is now the best thing about it. Smokes up a storm.
However, in spite of cleaning up the vintage open-frame motor, lubricating the gears, and even oiling the driver wheel linkages, it runs slow. In fact, it ran faster with the boiler shell off and just the smoke unit and motor were sitting on the wheel assembly. If I add cars behind the engine and tender, it runs even slower.
I power the tracks with my old vintage American Flyer 8B, 100 watt, transformer. Voltage around the layout is a continuous 15.4 volts, dropping to 14.9 volts as the engine crossing the rails where the voltage meter probes are set.
I could purchase a reconditioned American Flyer 30B transformer which puts out 18 volts to beef up the speed, but I am not sure if it is the transformer, the motor, or the electrical pick up.
Sounds like bad brushes and springs to me. The 314AW that I am working ran slow after cleaning and lube, and the cause was that the brush springs were weak. I replaced them, and it runs faster now.
I disagree. Don’t waste your money. I’ve got a #342 and I’ve replaced the springs,brushes and even swapped out armatures with another engine. I cleaned and lubricated all the gears. It still runs agonizingly SLOW. It barely pulls 3 cars.
My solution? I still run it, but I bought a brand new Lionel S scale shown below. It runs FAST smooth and quiet. It doesn’t look as cool, but at least its reliable.
Brushes and springs are cheap and I always suggest replacing them. However also look at the fingers on the reverse unit. Make sure they are not worn and barely making contact on the drum. Clean the drum! The motor is running slow because insufficient current is getting to it. And when it is under load it demands more juice! You may have a bad connection on the leads from the tender trucks. While the wire may still be attached most of the strands are broken restricting current flow. If you can switch tenders and if the loco runs fine you have ruled out the motor being a problem. Another area to look at is the wires leading from the tender to the plug. I have encountered the fabric being stuck but the majority of the strands in the wires being broken. This will definatlely prevent you engine from pulling! I hope this helps.
Oooh, 2 to 1 in favor of replacing the brushes and springs.
Major, you raise a good point on the wires from the tender. When I was in the process of rehabbing my old steamer last January, I had cut the original braided wires from the tender to the jack panel on the back of the engine. So, I ordered a new wiring harness from a well known source, whose name I will not mention. Three months later when the wiring harness arrived in the mail, it was hardly a reproduction of the original AF wiring harness. Instead, it looked like four different colored Brawa 26 gauge wires wrapped in a shoelace. I wired it in but ever since the speed of the engine has been considerably slower, coincidence or otherwise. I have wondered if the electrical pick up is good from the rails to the tender but if the electrical current is reduced to the motor because of inadequately sized wiring in the harness. Now that the issue has been raised, I will check that out with a volt meter.
It sounds like that would be a good place to start. Not being a purist when I have rewired the connection from the tender to the plug I just use black stranded wire. It is flexible enough and that solved my connection problem. I own three 312 pacifics and they are some of my best, smoothest quietest runners. On one of them I completely removed the plug connection and direct wired the motor to the tender in the same fashion that Gilbert did in the mid 50s on later steam locomotives. It is one less thing that can go wrong.
Measuring voltage without the tender unplugged from the locomotive will not tell you anything about the voltage drop that might be occurring when the train is running. That voltage drop is equal to the wire resistance multiplied by the current. If the current is zero, so is the voltage drop.
Not easily. You would have to measure the armature and field voltages separately, because they are both supplied separately from the tender. To make these measurements meaningful, you would have to have to locomotive loaded as it is when pulling a train. Unless you have a dynamometer track, that means having a voltmeter in the train, which would be quite a trick to read, or a telemetry arrangement to get the readings from the moving train to you.
Since measuring voltage at the motor would be difficult, if not down right impossible, let me ask this question. Since the gauge of the wires in the wiring harness may be too small to carry adequate voltage to the motor, is there a general rule of thumb that can be applied regarding the minimum gauge wire to ensure that adequate voltage is being supplied to the motor?
I did the same thing and highly recommend it. I guess I shouldn’t have been so blunt. Yes, I think you should still replace the brushes and springs. It’s not a bad idea. Just don’t expect a dramatic change. The only thing I haven’t done is replace the coil. The armature was used, so maybe I should have purchased new? I dunno. I’ve had the engine apart about a dozen times, and rewired it with little effect. I mean at least it runs OK, just not real fast and cannot pull more than a few cars.
Almost any wire heavy enough to be mechanically robust would be big enough. Here is my reasoning:
I assume that 100 millivolts is a tolerable voltage drop and that a typical Flyer locomotive draws about 2 amperes. This gives us a maximum resistance of 50 milliohms. Assuming that there is about 2 feet of wire involved in the entire circuit, that is 4 wires each 6 inches long, this requires a maximum resistivity of 25 milliohms per foot, which corresponds to about 24 AWG. (Resistance doubles about every 3 gauge numbers and increases by a factor of 10 about every 10 gauge numbers. Ten AWG has a resistance of 1 milliohm per foot.)
My guess is the wiring harness that I wound up getting is somwhere between 24 AWG and 28 AWG. That sounds barely acceptable. Of course, four wires in a wiring harness at 10 AWG each would be way too thick and rigid for an S scale engine and tender connection, as would 12 AWG to 16 AWG. So, my assumption is that the ideal gauge for this purpose would be somewhere between 18 AWG and 22 AWG.
I wonder what the original AC Gilbert supplied wiring harness wires were sized. Anyone know?
I suppose this topic has been exercised a bit and I apologize as a late-comer. I am not an expert in AF by any means. I’ve recently refurbished 2 AF steam engine motors on a 21160 and 293 (really old, with steel shell). The motors are quite ingeniously designed and I’m glad that Gilbert stayed with essentially the same design thru the decades before Lionel came along. Looking over the answers in this chain, I found cleaning to be useful, brushes and springs changeout to be useful, cleaning the face of the armature (carefully). But the one thing that really made the two engines perform was making sure there were 2 bushings on the armature drive axle (just as it goes into the frame). It is critical that the armature NOT be sloppy when the brush housing is screwed on. I stumbled on this mostly by trial and error. I noticed a bit of arcing after a refurb. Changed brushes and springs (again); cleaned armature face again; same results. I noticed after one reassembly that the armature could be moved in/out by about 1/16". Not a great amount of slop, but turns out by adding one additional o-ring on drive axle (for total of 2), the slop was gone. Armature still turned freely even after being snugged up to brush housing. When I tested the motor, where before it seemed to be laboring and perhaps at half speed, with the extra bushing, it positively blazed. Did same on second refurb engine and it too runs way better (though the steel shell does add a bit of loading). Just another aspect to consider during refurb and testing.
Wow, a 16-year-old thread and, lo and behold, it was started by me.
I am surprised that I never finished it, but it is never too late.
I did, in fact, replace the brushes and, thereafter, it ran just fine. I wound up building a layout for it and kept it up and running for a couple of years. I wound up retiring it for a second time in order to enlarge my HO scale layout.
