I need to get the shell of my proto 2000 mallet (1st generation - way before walthers). It appears there’s something slipping in the drive train. It moves but never picks up much speed. Anyway I looked and looked but couldn’t see the magic trick to get the shell off the bugger.
Help much appreciated.
Regards,
Charlie Comstock
As I recall, Charlie, you remove the steam dome on the top middle of the boiler (it has the whistle attached), prying it off with a small screwdriver, then loosen the screw underneath.
Brian
Thanks Brian, I’ll give that a shot when I get home.
Regards,
Charlie Comstock
I have the Y3 (Pre-walthers) and it isnt going to have a terribly fast top speed. It was more important that it operates very well between 1 and 40 smph or so.
I think the prototype’s effective top speed was in the 25mph range. But I’ve had this model since it was new-in-the-box and its been sitting in the rip track for awhile now waiting for attention. It’s performance made a dramatic turn for the worse last fall and it has trouble hitting more than about 10(scale)mph. Either there’s something wrong with the motor, or a set screw has loostened, or a press fit bushing isn’t very im’pressive’ any longer. I’m afraid a press on gear has split and it’s basically become an ornament unless I can get a replacement part.
Regards,
C.
Brian–
Thank you for that information. I also have a pre-Walthers 2-8-8-2, and I’ve been trying to figure out for years how to get into the darned thing just to see if it’s possible to add weight to make it at least PULL decently. Getting really tired of calling it “The Spinner”.
Thanks again,
Tom
The steam dome did indeed pop off and the upper half of the shell separated from the lower with a little jiggling. I took the upper weight off, exposing the motor, drive shafts and universals. Everything seemed firmly attached but a trifle dry. So I put a couple of tiny drops of LaBelle 108 on the universals and squirted some gear grease onto the worm gears.
I tried powering it with a 9V battery and it crawled nicely across the workbench.
So I put weight and printed circuit board back in place, hooked up the tender, stuck it on the track and tried it out again.
Exactly the same behavior as before. I just added tsunami to the tender and I had to set vstart to about 100 for it to start at the low end of the throttle control. I tried increasing and decreasing the bemf. I tried futzing with the bemf cutout. Nothing helped. It accelerated smoothly to about 10 smph and wouldn’t go any faster. I know this thing used to go significantly more rapidly than that.
Could it be that the motor has a blow winding on it? How could I tell this? The motors resistance (measured with my trusty Fluke DMM was about 6.7 ohms).
There was a small capacitor soldered across the motor terminals. I thought perhaps the tsunami is using a high frequency enough drive that a bunch of power is being lost through that cap but disconnecting it made no difference.
Do tsunamis put substantially lower voltage on the motor than other decoders? I’d think not because my other tsunami installation (spectrum 2-8-0) runs fine with out a noticible top speed decrease).
The other thing is the auto chuff rate variable’s value seems a little screwy.
I wonder if replacement motors are available. This was an expensive model (for plastic) and I’d hate to see it become an ornament sitting on an engine service track… Sigh.
Any ideas?
Thanks,
Charlie Comstock
ps. Tom, my friend Terry Roberts had some success getting these gutless wonders to pull better by layering some
Reset the engine to factory default for that decoder. (Im thinking in QSI terms, your mileage may vary)
If you dont get your top speed back, then something is going on.
That something is top speed. The computer should give you a straight line from Zero mph to full speed at 12 volts whatever might be result for a engine. If that line is drawn on chart it takes a diagional shape.
Is it possible you had set the computer to provide you with a performance line that is very flat from Zero to full speed at 10 smph?
I cannot say much about pulling, it managed 24 ore cars with metal wheels and custom fitted loads on a 3% a few times.
I know nothing of DCC but with 9 Volts DC any of my 5 would have crawled across the counter pretty rapidly.
If you have a Fluke handy, do you have access to a strobe light to check the max motor RPM? I do not know what that is, and I am not going to dig one out right now, but with the shell off you can calculate the overall gear ratio, and I can tell you all of mine will hit a scale 50 MPH, so you can come up with a reasonable motor RPM.
I’d call Walthers. ALL the P2K Heritage steam engines came with a LIFETIME warranty from LifeLike, and I believe they are honoring them. I am sure they have some motors if they ever sorted out the containers.
I’m certain that the decoder is programmed correctly for voltage curves. Actually its set up the same way as my 2-8-0 which doesn’t have any problems like this. I don’t have a strobe light but since this thing used to (more or less) charge around the layout at a scale 40mph I’m guessing the gear ratios haven’t changed (I’ve had this unit for years and it was brand new when I bought it - actually the insides of it betray some pretty elegant engineering in terms of designing the weights, motor mount, electrial board, and gear train!)
Guess I’ll try getting in touch with Walthers/P2K and see if they have a box of motors for the beast.
C.