I just received 2 brand new HO Atlas 8-40CW gold units that seem to have half the pulling power of 2 older 8-40CWs. You can tell that the new units are not nearly as heavy as the older ones. I suspect this is why I have to turn the DCC speed way up to get it to move at a moderate speed, yet it does it while slipping a little pulling 6 fairly free rolling passenger cars. They run much faster without a load. The older units can pull them with ease. In fact, the older ones can pull 15 freight cars without slipping. The new ones cannot. I’m guessing Atlas swapped more speaker area for less weight or tried to save money by putting less weight in or the quality control suffered and the assemblers forgot to install the weights. I have not yet had an opportunity to open one up to compare what is actually inside vs the older units. Has anyone else noticed this problem?
Peregoy,
[#welcome] To The Forums.
You might wan to check to see if You have a warped frame or trucks causing all the wheels to not touch the track. That will cause slipping and act similar to your description.
A simple test: Get a flat piece of glass, like a mirror and set the engines on it and with a sheet of paper, like losseleaf, see it You can slide it under any wheels. You should not be able to. If you can, then take a closer look at the side frames to make sure they are not twisted. A warped frame would be more evident.
Take Care!
Frank
From what I heard on other forums that Atlas shares a factory with bowser and intermountain and they all use the same mabuchi clones. There has been reports on other forums about these motors being not to good mostly on intermountain. They are new on Atlas beginning to appear in the trainman gp38-2 release last year. Atlas stated that the motors are made to their specs so dont compare them to intermountain or bowser. But we will see about that as more people comment on them.
Make sure both trucks are drivng the same. One could be dragging or a wheelset might be. I doubt all 6 wheelsets are slipping on both sides(12 wheels) pulling 6 cars, that’s just not much weight. If you find a wheel or axle, etc not driving/slipping then you can diagnose from there.
If all 12 are driving equally(and touching) then I would think maybe more than a lack of weight involved such as oil on track. If all are driving well, then not a motor issue.
Richard
Interesting observation.
I picked one up Saturday (the CN 15th Anniversary model) and haven’t noticed that at all. All I did was change the address, and set it on the layout with a train of about 10 assorted freight cars ranging from a 40-foot hopper to an 89-foot auto rack. No wheel slippage or any other sign it was having difficulty pulling. It would creep along nicely (considering it has almost zero run time on it) at speed step 1. I don’t have any of the older runs so I can’t offer any comparisons there.
As for “have(ing) to turn the DCC speed way up to get it to move at a moderate speed”, well, ALL of the QSI-equipped locos I have ran that way out of the box. Speed-matching them “fixes” that.
Are you running these individually or do you have them consisted? If consisted, you don’t have them running in opposite directions, do you?
I have one loco thaty came with a mabuchi type motor. It went through three of these in an eighteen month period. I finally replaced it with a Mashima knockoff. The loco in question is an old Stewart U25B. Hardly worth the effort.
Trying seeing if any of the wheels spin freely. If they do you may have cracked a gear or the worm cover popped off.
I’ve had the latter happen a lot on a U30C. I ended up taking a file to the gear tower so it latches the worm cover better.
Wow I was gonna get a couple of these. I hope this is one time incident, and not something wrong with their entire run of these.
Interesting to find out if you find anything wrong with the wheels or trucks. Not good for Atlas to cheap out on some cheaper motors. Atlas always had quality running motors in them.
I have 4 of these from previous runs, and they all run and sound great.
Thanks for all of the suggestions. Much appreciated. I’ll try them out this weekend and let you all know.