If any of you guys have experience with the Mehano 4-8-2, I could use some help. All my issues are electrical and (of course) weird.
When passing over a particular track switch (Walthers/Shin code 83 cirved #8) this loco shorts out the track on the point side (actually when the drivers are on the closure rails) and one side looses wheel/electrical contact when the drivers are on the frog side. Over 20 other locos have no issues with this piece of track, and the 4-8-2 only has them when moving slowly (like 4 volts DC on the track).
It appears the second set of drivers does not pick up power, but the other 3 sets do. I have removed the pilot and trailing trucks to eliminate any weirdness there. To make it worse, the problem on the frog side of the switch only happens when the nose of the loco is travelling in the direction from points to frog (does not happen if I turn the loco around so that the nose leads into the points from the frog.
No, this is NOT an April Fool’s joke. I can live with this, but don’t want to [8o|]
OK, somehow wheels running on the stock rails are touching the other side of the track. Step 1 is take your NMRA gauge and check the track gauge, the clearance of the guard rails, depth of the channel inbetween the stock rails and guard rails. Then check the gauge of all your locomotive wheels. Do the simple stuff first. Fix anything the gauge turns up.
Then, especially if your guard rail clearance is wide, superglue some very thin styrene plastic to the inside of the guard rails to prevent the inside of the wheels from touching metal. Recent issues of MR have had pictures on doing this.
I believe this locomotive has deep wheel flanges that cannot go through a code 83 turnout without the wheels being lifted off the rail, particularly within the turnout frog.
Yeah, I did all that when I first noticed the problem. The check gauge is OK on the track, and 3 of 4 drivers are in gauge. One driver pair is just a tad narrow (you can force the gauge to fit if you press it down on the wheels), but I’m not about to tear apart a great running loco for that (I am not too good at disasembling steamers). Besides, where I have the short problem is when all drivers are on the points. I thought maybe the wire from the Tortoise switch motor was hitting something on the loco frame, but that didn’t seem to be the case. The points gauge actually are a bit wide, but there is no good way to fix that, and none of the other locos (I have run 20 or so over this track) have an issue with it. It is just plain weird.
Actually all the guard rails on all my Walthers/Shinohara and Atlas Mark 4 turnouts are good. This surprised me, because on my last layout I used code 100 Peco turnouts and hade to shim the guard rails exactly as you describe. After I did that, they are worked great. BTW, that was back in the 1980’s, I would think the current stuff is better.
While this loco has wheels that are not RP-25 profile, they pass through all my turnouts OK. I was expecting issues, but there were none. I have quite a few of the late Mehano steamers and they all run quite well. I was surprised. And Code 83 track doesn’t seem to be an issue with anything I have run so far (and I have some pretty old locos).
Issue(s) resolved! It turned out there were 3 individual problems.
1)Slop in the loco mechanism excess play side-to-side allowing the inside of the drivers to contact the points on the back side of the wheels at times.
same points being slightly wide in gauge (that I was able to fix by slightly bending them)
the points not always contacting the stock rails (power routing turnout). I’m not sure why this only happened with the one loco, but it did.