Constant need for Warranty service

Model Railroader General Discussion (Model Railroader)
1

A minute ago, as I was packing my latest brand new locomotive up for warranty service (this time a flaky motor in an athearn genesis f3), I started thinking about the startling percentage of new purchaches that i’ve gotten in the last few years that ended up needing factory service. While it’s unusual for a locomotive to simply refuse to move as in this situation, i’ve also sent locomotives back for the following:

defective smoke unit fan: BLI, MTH

defective smoke unit “dimmer”: MTH

buzzing speaker: MTH, BLI

firmware problems with the decoder: MTH

shorted out decoder: MTH, Intermountain

burned out marker lights: MTH, Intermountain

no lights at all: Intermountain

grinding gears in one of the trucks: MTH, Intermountain

Curiously, I’ve never had to send back a Bachmann.

Before we start trying to diagnose all of those problems, I’ll just say that every one of those locos had the issue straight out of the box, each issue was addressed by a factory, and all returned locomotives now perform flawlessly. It’s as if everyone’s QC deptartment has been relocated to the service department…

On sound equiped locomotives, the number needing work is nearly half of my new purchaces. Sometimes it seems like the more I spend on an engine, the more “bells and whistles” it has, the more likely it is to need service straight out of the box. I’ll admit that i’m pretty picky, but these darn things are expensive!

Now my question:

Is everyone else dealing with this too, or am I just that un-lucky?

ps: we’re talking HO

2

This isnt something new, back years ago(pre RTR era), even the brass engines needed some fine tuning to run at thier best. This was a procedure expected to be done by the modeler. Today we have taken the modeling out of model railroading in many aspects. From RTR engines to prebuilt and weathered models. I work on many older brass models for others because they now lack the skill once common to most everybody in the hobby. Of coarse the added complexity of electronics and what are basicly mini computers in our engines for the DCC/Sound part, are beyond pretty much everybody but an electronics engineer. I see the same issues your having from pretty much everybody else. QC from the PRC doesnt exhist for the most part. And parts to fix that expensive train are also far and few between. I feel sorry for the next couple generations that will be trying to keep these trains running. Where as the older brass, Athearn blue box, Mantua ect will still be running and fixable. Your not unlucky, just living with the current status quo. Mikie

3

Not trying to make a wave here - BUT!

It seems that you have way more problems with the MTH brand than any other!

Do others have this high of a percentage problems with MTH stuff?

Our Club has had way more problems with the MTH O 3 rail stuff than we ever have with the Lionel brand.

BOB H - Clarion, PA

4

I may be wrong about this, especially since my information is dated by about four or five years already, but I believe the bulk of assembly work in Chinese toy factories is done by itinerant young women and girls coming off farms in the increasingly industrialized China. They work for peanuts and a warm place to stay. They are trained in a matter of an hour or more, and then have to sit for long hours assembling mind-numbing and endless arrays of the same items until that production run is over. They move on to another assembly line in another factory or to another model in the same one. Production, and not necessarily quality, is the rule of the day. I’m not even sure each item is tested for a few minutes, but if it is, the product often seems to get broken or develops some other defect during transit.

It’s hard to put a number on the failure rates, but I am sure it is near or over 10%.

5

You are unlucky, to say the least.

None of us have a failure rate that high.

Rich

6

In my view, the problems are more related to design and materials than to assembly. This morning, while sorting through stuff for an upcoming swap meet, took several Kato HO diesels out of their boxes and put them on the test track. Every one of them started running instantly at a low throttle setting. Most of the P2Ks of the same vintage are frozen up with sludge in the gearboxes.

7

In my view, the problem is that some companies believe that warranty service is cheaper than in plant quality control.

I have run into some north american plant managers who felt the same.

Dave

8

I have over 100 locomotives and none have ever needed service. None are MTH.

9

I think that U.S. companies have to do good QC on their products manufactured in China or other overseas countries. By rejecting substandard products that don’t meet assembly or material requirements they force the manufacturing company to do good work.

But we also must insist on good quality. And support with purchases those companies that get it right the first time.

Enjoy

Paul

10

Out of my locomotives, I’ve only had to ever send one* in, a BLI 2-8-2 over the “chuff sensor issue” they had a little while back, where the reed switch was not reliable. I sent it in once, replaced it once myself, and got fed up when it went a third time, so I just now have one steamer with only bells and whistles… [:-^]

BTW… I have 2 Bowser, 2 BLI, 1 Intermountain, 2 Bachmann, 3 Athearn BB, 1 Athearn Genesis, 5 Atlas units, and 1 powered Proto 2000. So, 1 in 17 for me. (*Had a third Bachmann, but it’s motor died, cooked the brushes, found it had a crack in the armature winding that was arcing on DC, not enough to dead short, nor enough to trip my circuit breaker, but enough to overheat the motor and cook/scortch the brushes, and I had done some work on the shell to customize it, and so didn’t want to send it in. Newer style the old shell doesn’t fit onto it, and never got around to replacing it. Count this one and it makes it 2 in 18. And I say had, as I don’t count it as whole.) Still seems a lot less than what your finding…

DCC components however, well, that’s a different matter. [sigh]

EDIT: “powered” Proto 2000 to go along with 2 “dummy” units. It’s an E8 ABB Set. So this makes it 1 in 19, or 2 in 20, depends on the Bachmann I turned into a static display for now…

11

I’ve been in the hobby for a while, had a lot of locomotives. 15 years ago I would have spent $40-$80 on a “nice” locomotive and been shocked to have had a problem. I know you can still buy locomotives like that, but flashlight electronics just don’t do it for me anymore. So now I spend 4x that and I’ve gotten to where I just expect problems.

I really like all of the cool new features, but it just seems like nobody (definitely not MTH) really understands how to make all of that crazy stuff work. Im not the guy that yearns for the days of my youth when good stuff came in blue boxes and everything was molded on. I do get nervous, however, thinking about a day 15 years from now when all of these fancy locomotives I have now are sitting on a shelf while my Life-Like F7 from 1989 is still doing laps around the basement at scale 294 mph.

12

Hi!

I’ve got (and had) an awful lot of locos from different manufacturers and had my share of problems with them. But with only a very few exceptions, they were problems I could fix myself.

In reading the OP’s post, the thing that sticks out is that 70 percent of his loco problems are with MTH. Realizing that, those locos would be fixed and sold and I would not be buying anymore of that brand. Actually, I don’t have any MTH, as their reputation for being “difficult” is not a secret - as many on this forum will attest.

The locos of today - especially DCC w/sound - are very sophisticated and complicated mechanisms. And, that all leads to a higher percentage of problems. In comparison, the Athearn locos of years ago - DC of course - rarely had a problem and they ran for decades. But of course they were “simple” machines.

One other comment… to relish in this hobby, one must be a tinkerer, and familiar with mechanics and electrical situations. Or, at least willing and able to learn.

For what its worth…

13

At last count there are 58 locos on the BRVRR. Most of them are Athearn BB locos many with self-installed sound decoders. I’ve never had a problem with any of them that couldn’t be repaired in a few minutes with a soldering iron.

I have several (8) PK2 locos, again with self installed sound decoders in all but one and except for gear problems and one dropped engine never a problem.

There are a few Atlas locos in which I installed sound. So far no problems with them at all. The single InterMountain loco with factory installed sound has performed flawlessly to now.

There are 5 BLI locos on the layout. Two have run for years without any problems whatsoever. One, a NYC Niagara had a bad speaker which I replaced with a factory supplied replacement. Two other BLI locos had to be sent back for repairs to the smoke units/blowers which failed in minutes. The smokers are important to my grandson, but frankly, I can do without them. However, for the price paid these failures are a disappointment. BLI quickly repaired them without a problem, but still.

Someone has already said it, the modern sound/smoke equipped model locomotive is a complex machine. Complexity equals reliability problems. Good quality control can minimize the problem but is not likely to eliminate them.

14

It likely is.

I had a job doing QC in a tool and die shop one summer in college. We only checked a relatively small percentage of a given batch. I understand that, statistically, one of the parts I selected could be rejected, but it always sort of got me that I could be randomly passing over dozens of bad parts or managed to select nothing but bad parts.

15

Most quality control programs provide only a delusion of qualty to satisfy management. You cannot inspect quality in after the fact; it must be designed and built in at the start.

Pretty much what you hear about Chineese imports in any area, not just model railroading, is poor quality. It’s not that they can’t build quality; they simply choose not to. If the importer wants high quality, they have to insist on it and have their own people in the factory to force it.

jim

16

I too worked for a while in a machine shop, and did some QC work. We checked EVERY piece - but then out pieces went into jet engines and military aricraft. There was talk of statistical process control. I read the books. I studied the methods. And my conclusion was that it is one heck of a load of bunk. At least for the way we made things - for example, smaller parts were made a dozen at a time in fixtures, on as many as 4 different machines. For SPC to work, each batch would have to be sorted into bins based ont he machine AND the position ont he fixture it came from - just lumping them all into a finished parts bin and then sampling some ‘random’ bunch of them would not allow detection of a problem with the cutting head wearing on one of the machines, or the fixture getting out of alignment so that maybe the left end was dead middle in tolerance, 3 spaces over was tending to the upper bound and maybe the far right was past the upper bound. If one of those pieces from the far right was never tested - as many as 1 in 6 bad parts could be passed on as good!

Back in the 70’s in MR they had some factory visits to vaious manufacturers. I think they continues into the 80s/ For loco makers, it was common to see a test track where, after final assembly, the loco was briefly run to make sure it worked. EVERY ONE. Not every 10th one. Now emplying statistical methods, only a few are tested - however, like the machine shop fixture, those locos are assembled by dozens of differnet people. Just one person slacking, or being irritated with his job and doing a poor job of attaching something, and if your random grab to test never catches one from that person’s station, you are letting some percentage of definitely bad units through.

I guess I’ve been rather lucky. Aside from the cracked gears in my P2k Geeps, which weren;t in warranty anyway as I bought them all second hand on ebay or at train shows, my other issues have been minor and I just fixed them. My Athearn R

17

The Chinese can make great stuff but often the companys that order don’t care because of cost or someone there decides to cut costs for their own pocket, happens in this country too!!!

18

I appreciate the comment about tinkering, and I agree. I think the new electronics in the RTR stuff actually adds tinkering possibilities. For example, programming has become an enjoyable part of the hobby for me - along side the more “hands on” tasks.

I also enjoy adding sound to “dcc ready” locos, and I’ve actually had good luck with MTH diesels in that reguard. In fact I have stopped opting for PS3 in their diesels, the soundtraxx tsunami for that application is just better.

The high-end steamers are a different story. I enjoy all of the factory features and i’m willing to pay for them, but i’m not willing to risk voiding the warranty on a $300 locomotive just to get my tinkering