got a brand new MTH Railking from Justrains today and it seems one of the front siderods is not working correctly.
notice how low the short bars is. it does not rotate around like the other side or the rears. here is a picture of front the side that is working.
any suggestions?
thanks, mike
ok as i was looking close, this fell from somewhere. now i just need to find where it goes!
my best guess is the bad side is 180 deg out of time right now. Does the spring clip go on the back side of the shaft that holds all the rods together?
Jason
i thought it was 180 out of sink but when i tried to change it the one side rod moves freely and falls back down. the rest don’t move unless the engine is in motion.
here is a video of the problem
The thing that is causing you trouble seems to be the eccentric crank. On the one MTH steam locomotive that I have, the eccentric crank is held onto the drive wheel by a screw down its center. At the wheel, there are four notches. There are two tangs on the end of the eccentric casting that engage two of the notches in the wheel. (The cylindrical shaft of the eccentric-crank casting is also the main crank and carries the side rod, two spacers, and the main rod.) Your picture does not show a Philips-head screw like I have; but I imagine that they may have gone to something more realistic and trickier to tighten. Try pressing the eccentric crank toward the drive wheel and rotating it to see whether it engages the wheel at some angle. If so, then the problem is to figure how to tighten the screw that presumably passes through the eccentric crank, to keep it engaged.
The rod is definitely 180 degrees out. There should be a part on the shaft that will hold the shaft in that position when the screw is tightened down.
Earl
There should be detents on a sleeve(it is part of the side rod on the wheel end) These detents should lock into the driver wheel. Is the shaft through this sleeve (hexhead on the end) tight? Is there more play in the one that does not work? I know on postwar Lionel the same thing will happen if the shaft backs out.
Jason
Mike, You mite try checking for the parts drawing on the MTH site. It should show where all the running gear parts go as well as a listing by name and part number.
Ooops, missed that it was new. I’d call about a repair, if something else should fail in the near future wouldn’t want to run into warranty issue for an un-authorized repair. [B)]
ok. it did lock into place and then just need a slight tightening. works like a charm and this is one fantastic model for the traditional runners! thanks for all the help and advice!
btw way, ordered from justrains on friday after 2:30 and arrived today(tues) at 2pm. $539 to my front door. video of it working!
Congratulations! I looked more closely at your pictures and think I can now see the flats on those screws, whose heads originally looked circular to me and therefore problematic to tighten.
If you are interested in such things, you might investigate whether your locomotive has the same subtle design flaw that I found in my Rail King big boy. (Anyone not so interested, read no farther.) It goes back to Lionel’s eccentric-crank design on the scale Hudsons, at least. Lionel unrealistically gave the eccentric the same radius as the main crank, which meant that the crank casting was at a 45-degree angle to the main crank in order to put the eccentric 90 degrees behind the main when moving forward. The castings on opposite sides of the locomotive were therefore angled 45 degrees in opposite directions, so that both sides’ eccentrics would lag the main cranks. To accomplish this, they put 2 tangs on each eccentric crank and 4 slots, 90 degrees apart, on the wheels.
MTH apparently tried to approximately halve the unrealistic eccentric radius by rotating the eccentric castings closer to the main crank, more like 30 degrees than 45. To do this, they rotated the slots in the driver slightly. But they should have rotated one pair of slots about 15 degrees in one direction and the other pair 15 degrees in the other direction, for spacings of 60-120-60-120 instead of the Lionel 90-90-90-90. But alas they didn’t and kept the Lionel spacing. This forced them to put the left-side cranks in the wrong slots, so that it led the main cranks instead of lagging as it should, in order to get the eccentric-crank radius to a reasonable-looking distance.
I fixed mine by filing the tangs off the eccentric casting and depending only on friction and well-tightened screws to keep the cranks in the right place.