I just spent about 20 minutes cleaning the wheels on My Gp7. I used a bright boy, Cleaning a little section at a time and then Manually advancing them and continuing until I got all the way around.one question I have is I notice two of the wheels turn freely, is this normal?
The other is, Is there an easier way to clean wheels?
What process do You use to clean wheels?
Here’s how I do it.
Wet a paper towel with rubbing alcohol. Place it over the rails on your layout. Place the locomotive on the rails with one truck on the paper towel and the other on the rails. Hold the locomotive in place with your hand and accelerate it to full throttle. The wheels spin against the paper towel and get clean. Turn the loco around and clean the other truck.
Hope this helps!
The wheels that turn freely are a sure sign of cracked axle gears. Lifelike no longer offers free replacements, but you can purchase Athearn 60024 gears from Horizon and they work better than the Lifelike ones.
Get a Kadee Speedi-Driver Cleaner. It’s a brass bristle brush that you connect to your power supply, be it DC or DCC. Gently hold the brush to the wheels while the power is on and the wheels will spin against the brush bristles. They’ll be clean in no time. Don’t press the brush against the wheels, just hold it gently against them. When one set is done move on to the next one. As for the freely turning wheels, that’s a sure sign of a split axle gear. Forget about fixing the gear. It has to be replaced, If you have an old Athearn loco laying around 9 times out of 10 the axle gears from it will fit perfectly.
Not entirely correct. Yes, the gears are probably cracked, but you CAN still get warranty replacements free from Walthers if you still have the receipt. I just went through this (8 of 12 axles on three P2K GP7s) and of course I didn’t have the receipt, so they sold me the parts for $3 for a two-pack of axles (three bucks per truck, in effect) plus shipping. Contact Walthers Customer Service through their website for details.
Chris
Thanks to all of You who replied, I thought something was probably broke…I’ll contact walthers
Right after Walthers bought Life-Like, I had the same axle problem with 2 GP9s. Walthers replaced mine for free. That was a couple of years back, and maybe they’ve changed their policy. I did mine through e-mail. You might get a different person on the phone. But, you want to do this, because the other ones will fail, too.
My LHS orders stuff for me from Walthers. I have to pay sales tax, but no shipping charge. On an item like this, the shipping will not only be larger than the tax, it will likely be larger than the cost of the axles. So, maybe you want to beef up your order a bit, or maybe you want to see what your LHS can do for you.
And one more thing - Don’t use a Bright Boy on your wheels. I’m not sure about the Kadee brush thing, either. (EDIT: See Jeffrey’s post below. He’s had good results with this.) Both of these are abrasive cleaning techniques, and may result in some pitting and scratching of the wheel surface. That will make the wheels more susceptible to dirt pickup, and you’ll be cleaning them more frequently. If you’re cleaning your loco wheels a lot, your track is the source of the dirt. Plastic rolling stock wheels will dirty up your track much more quickly than metal ones. The ultimate tool for keeping everything clean is a good track cleaning car, like a CMX. It’s kind of expensive, but that Bright Boy is going to pit and scratch your track just like it does to your wheels. Solvent-based cleaning cars will get the grunge off without scratching anything.
Amen to that. Using the Brite Boy for that is just like using sandpaper. I’ve been using the Kadee Speedi-Driver Cleaner in the manner I outlined for a few YEARS now and have yet to see any pitting and/or scratching.
Thanks for the first-hand info, Jeffrey. Since I don’t have one of the Kadee cleaners, I couldn’t really give an informed opinion. I guess my warning was not really necessary.
I’ve tried a friends Kadee cleaner once just to see how it works. To be honest I didn’t like it, I prefer the paper towel soaked in alcohol method. Its fast and easy to do. I like to use the BLUE Shop Towels over the plain white ones, they last longer and don’t come apart when wet like the white ones do.
The way I clean my wheels is by placing a paper towel of track cleaner on the track and run my locomotives back and forth over it.
I have been using the Kadee Speedi Driver Cleaner for probably as long as it has been on the market without any noticeable damage to wheels, plated or otherwise. Some of my locomotives are going on twelve years old now so if there was a problem, I believe it would have shown up by now.
Along with the Kadee, I use Wal-Mart’s generic cotton swabs, saturated with denatured alcohol. The are pointed on one end and fit nicely against the wheel flange. As the wheels spin, the Kadee knocks off the larger crud and the swab finishes the job.
My rolling stock is all equipped with metal wheels. I run trains two-three times a week and never have to clean the track itself. I do apply Wahl Clipper Oil about every six months more out of habit than necessity.
John Timm
Great Western fan, welcome to the world of MRR. Ever one has a different way of doing the same thing![^]
On my steam engines I use the Kadee cleaning brush, tender wheels I use 600 grit sand paper.
Diesels I use the paper towel method except I use Goo Gone. Cleans better than alcohol and wheels seem to stay clean longer.
One thing that has cut down on my wheel cleaning by 85% is a track cleaning car!. I use 3 Trainline cleaning cars. I run them ever day, two dragged and one pushed 3 times around each line.
As far as plactic wheels making the track getting dirty faster, I am not sure it is true! I am 95% all metal wheels and track got nasty just as fast as when it was 95% plastic wheels.
Cuda Ken
Y’know, I made that comment based on the “conventional wisdom” around here. To be perfectly honest, I know I need to clean my track when the subway trains down in the tunnels start stalling out. Cleaning the wheels doesn’t help, but running the CMX down there does the job. The surface tracks, on the other hand, don’t seem to need cleaning as often.
The odd thing about this is that I NEVER run plastic wheels down in the tunnels. Above ground, my freight fleet is a mixture of metal and plastic, with some of the plastic wheel cars dating back to the 1960s and some pretty new. Also, I run the subway trains very frequently, so there isn’t an issue with “unused trackage.” Besides, the tunnels are covered so ambient dirt accumulation should be lower than on the surface.
Of course, Murphy’s Law may be the answer. The worst place for a train to stall out is in the tunnel, and the hardest track to inspect and clean manually is also in the tunnel. But, Mr. Murphy meets his match with the CMX car.
Kadee’s abrasive wheel cleaner does a good job, however I would caution one about using it on NS wheelsets. I have found that the bristles on the wheel cleaner can scratch and remove the NS coating from some wheels. I do use my Kadee wheel cleaner on my older Athearn models with the scintered iron wheels, having found that it makes the contact surface of these wheels nice and smooth. I do like to keep those wheels around as they have provided better traction than the Nickel Silver puppies in certain applications.
At our club, we use a bit of Naptha on a paper towel and run the lokey over the soaked area. That technique does well at cleaning the lokey wheels and leaves no residue. [C):-)]
Strange that I haven’t noticed this on my more expensive locos with nickel silver wheels. I think that after three plus years it would have shown up by now. Now, I have a friend in Alexandria who says it scratched the wheels on his locos but he presses it against the wheels so hard that they almost stop turning even at full power. I just touch mine to the wheels enoiugh to get power to them then gently move the brush around so it can clean the wheels quickly. Not a scratch or score mark yet.