My dad has passed on and left me with very many athearn engines. He was very good at changing numbers and as such the ATSF F-7 A&B’s are about 100 or so. Bunch of New Havens also.
I have tried runing them hooked up in consists and always smell electrical arching and see sparks at night. They run great alone, but jerky hooked up together. They all have Kadee couplers. They all have the metal frame.
Wish to isolate the motors and upgrade to DCC with sound just to keep the many numbers that Dad had done. He also extensively upgraded these units with handrails, windows, lighting, etc.
That sounds about right to me. The easy fix for this is to use one of Kadee’s plastic couplers - the number doesn’t spring to mind [;)], but there are several versions. The metal frame of these diesels is part of the current collection, so the units need to be electrically isolated from one another. A better solution, but more work, is to body-mount Kadee’s own plastic draught gear boxes, used with the metal couplers. You’d also have to modify the frame slightly by lopping off the coupler mounting pads. Either way, nice to see that you plan on keeping them. [swg]
Would that coupler grounding thing still be a problem after the motor was isolated and a decoder installed? I’ve never run across that with any of my Athearns, but it makes sense.
Everyone here is right about insulating at least one of the sides of the couplers of these locos and good on you for perpetuating your Dad’s memory in this way.
I have a minor concern that if they are the really old Athearn motor, will they be a bit heavy on the current draw for your DCC chips? Perhaps the cheaper can motors might be in your interest if that is the case!
The above posts are correct in regard to the running directions (do try the nose to tail, to check this out) of you locos and insolating them from one another too. But to give a quick answer to your other question…
The most simple way I have found to covert these Athearns to DCC is with the decoder specific Digitrax (wish I could remember the number, but I draw a blank this evening), but I don’t know if the new sound decoders have this simple conversion package.
None the less it is a pretty simple fix, even if hard wiring in a DCC decoder. From what I have heard from people…The hard part for them is to isolate the motor on some locos. On the Athearns the motor will pop out from the frame and can be isolated by bending up or nipping off the tabs from the under side that make contact with the frame…A bit of vinyl electrical tape will assure non-contact here. At that point it’s just a matter of following the directions with the decoder and attaching the proper wire to the proper place. The main thing to remember, is the power goes to the decoder first and then everywhere else.
I have done a number of Athearns with DCC upgrades…But…I have to admit I have not installed any sound. But, I’m sure the same rules apply.
IF you are going to upgrade to DCC then you’re in for a treat. You get to tear down all the locomotives and insulate the motor from the frame. It’s easy to do just time consuming. You’ll have to remove the motor and then add strips of electrical insulated tape to the frame floor of the frame and also nip the copper clip springs off the bottom clip so that they also won’t make contact with the frame floor. Solder the orange wire of the decoder to the bottom pick up copper clip and the gray wire to the top clip. The red and black wires solder to the truck pick ups. the white wire to the front headlight (you’ll have to change that too since the athearn headlight also returns thru the frame.) and the yellow wire to the rear headlight. tony’s train exchange has a diagram on wiring the decoder to old athearn units… www.tonystrainexchange.com chuck
When you remove the motor and insulate it, remember to re-install it with a nylon screw, not the original metal screw. I think it’s a 2-56 screw.
I’ve done a number of older Athearn engines. Most of these were from the 50’s and early 60’s, so they’re getting on in years. Of all of them, only one actually ran well enough after I put the decoder in to run on my layout. Even that one is a poor runner, and very, very noisy. It’s so loud that there would be no point in putting sound into the engine.
I took my two rubber-band drive engines and pulled out the motors. They now can be run as “honorary” dummy engines.
Hopefully, the care bestowed upon your engines by your Dad will make them good candidates for modernization. There’s no reason it can’t be done, particularly if they run well on DC.
Congrats on your good taste; your dad sounds like a man after my own heart. Those Athearn F7s were always solid little beasts besides being good-looking. When my late brother squired me around the Milwaukee area in the mid-'50s, I learned to love the old First Generation Diesels and always liked the chunky beauty of the Fs. I sold dozens of Athearn F7s in my little northwoods hobby shop in the '80s and often made up train sets for customers. The only problem I ever had was their coupler mounts, which I knew would cause shorting if F7As were run back-to-back. Follow the suggestions of the guys who’ve done the motor isolation or replace the metal couplers with plastic Kadees–and may I suggest you use shorter shanked replacements if they’re available? (I’ve been out of touch with the nuts and bolts of that end of things for nearly 20 years now, so I don’t know how many varieties of Kadee plastic couplers are available.)
(Although I’m in O scale now, building turn of the [20th] century locos and equipment, I’d dearly love to own an ABA set of O scale F7s, preferably in the old Soo Line maroon-and-Dulux-gold livery!)
Athearns are “hot chassis”, i.e. the metal chassis carries current from the wheels on one side of the locomotive to the motor. Metal (conductive) couplers carry current from one chassis to the next. If you couple up a pair of A units back to back (the traditional way) the chassis of one locomotive is connected to the north rail, the other locomotive is connected to the south rail, and current flows from north rail to south rail thru the coupler. The connection thru the coupler is intermittant, comes and goes, and so the locomotives start and stop. You can see arcing inside the closed coupler knuckles if this is the problem.
Kadee recommends a #37 coupler which is plastic and non conductive for the Athearn F7 and GP38 models. The best way to install the #37 is to discard the stock Athearn plastic coupler boxes, and drill and tap the lugs on the chassis ends 2-56 and use the little roundish coupler box that comes with the #37. You can do the drilling with nothing more than a hand held pin vise, but a drill press does it faster. A 2-56 tap requires a #50 drill. Decent hardware stores carry both the drills and the taps.
It may be that your father only ran his locomotives alone, or on