Very good, Bobby. I was wondering whether Lionel held the phase control back from 100 percent so that they would have room to unbalance it to implement the whistle-bell control. Those pictures seem to confirm that. One polarity seems to go to about 100 percent while the other drops back to a later point.
The date on my transformer is G0906.
Based on everything that was said, it’s probably the resistor or smoke unit itself. I plan on taking this to the shop I bought it and seeing if they will fix it…all I know I have 2 kids that want this thing to work as they love it.
Thanks for all the responses and help!
Jeff
I noticed in the January CTT a letter correcting an error in a previous issue, which repeated the often-seen myth that, for a separate accessory transformer, “you must…phase the transformers”. It occurred to me that this discussion of the CW80’s eccentric voltage behavior provides a good counter-example.
“Phasing”, or getting transformers’ outputs in phase with each other, reduces the voltage difference between those outputs. If both transformers are truly transformers (having sinewave outputs), the voltage difference can be zero if the track voltage happens to be set the same as the accessory voltage, for example, both set to 14 volts. Obviously this is often not the case, as the train will be run at different speeds and voltages. However, neither the accessories nor the trains are affected by the voltage difference, nor would the greater voltage difference resulting from out-of-phase transformers have any effect either.
Judging by accounts on this forum, there must be some folks who use conventional transformers for accessories along with a CW80 for the trains. In this case, it is impossible to get the voltage difference even close to zero. For example, 14 volts RMS to the train (10 on a simple meter) and 14 volts RMS to the accessories results in a voltage difference of about 11 volts RMS between the two (10 on the meter), about the best you can do.
The situation is similar if you use DC for one and AC for the other. In this case, 14 volts for each produces a 20-volt RMS difference. This situation also occurs when both supplies are AC but at different frequencies, as might be the case for the several forum members that we have in Europe. The fact that these two arrangements work without any problems seems to me to demonstrate that out-of-phase accessory transformers are not a problem either.
According to the Lionel website trouble shooting page:
“a volt meter will not render an accurate voltage reading of the CW-80 unless the transformer is under an electrical load i.e. lamp, lighted car, etc.”
I have an older CW-80 and have been following the discussion of its peculiarities with some interest.
Henry
Lionel would be correct in saying that an ordinary AC voltmeter is inaccurate with the CW80. But simply loading the transformer won’t fix that. There are two problems:
The output circuit adjusts the voltage by connecting the output terminal to the actual internal transformer part way through each half cycle of the AC waveform. But, before it makes that connection, it is not completely off but leaks a little current to the terminal. When the load is only the very high impedance of a voltmeter, this effect exaggerates the voltage read. This is undoubtedly what Lionel was thinking about.
The other problem is that all but rather expensive AC voltmeters do not measure the actual root-mean-square AC voltage. Instead they measure the average of the absolute value of the voltage waveform. For a sine wave, this is about 90 percent of the RMS voltage; so the meter is calibrated to exaggerate the voltage by 11 percent to compensate. Unfortunately, the CW80’s waveform is far from being a sine wave. The result is that a typical voltmeter reads substantially lower than the actual voltage, when connected to a CW80, even when a load is connected.
By the way, where did you find the “Lionel website trouble shooting page”? I can’t find anything like that on their very frustrating site.
Lionel recently changed their homepage. I’m posting what I hope is a direct link to the trouble shooting page. The link can be found on their “Getting Stated” page:
http://www.lionel.com/GettingStarted/index.cfm
There isn’t a whole lot of topics covered. Their manuals and parts list download pages are usually more informative.
Henry