I have a few older P2K’s that I bought recently on E-Bay. I really like these P2K’s.However not unusual for the older ones, they had cracked plastic axles. I replaced them with Athearn axles I bought (since I never got a response from Walthers from my e-mails). No big deal. However they run poorly. I’m wondering if anyone else had this problem.
They run erratically. They seem to be losing contact with the rails and jerk along the track. The lights flicker.
I run on DC. The other locos I have , Atlas, Kato, Athearn run absolutely fine. The wheels seem to be clean. However is it possible that when I replaced the wheels onto the axles they may not be exactly in guage? Is this causing either a pinching effect or am I losing contact with the pickup contacts on the trucks? I did roll the repaired wheelsets on my track and they seemed fine. But are they that delicate?
Anybody have some ideas?
Thanks,
Tom
Tom,
You are losing continuity somewhere in the power feed. go back and check what you last worked on and see if the pickups off the wheels is still making good contact. The flickering lights are a dead giveaway that there is a bad connection in there somewhere. Good luck. J.R.
Erratic running after wheel or axle-gear replacement is generally caused by not seating the square bronze bushings properly into their slots. It mis-aligns the wheels, vertically.
One also needs an NMRA gauge since the wheels have been pulled off and have to be re-gauged.
Absolutely, Tom.
I own 60+ locos, some 15 which are P2Ks. I also own Kato, Atlas, Stewart, and Athearn. I hold regular operating sessions and put a lot of scale miles on all my locos, working them hard.
The locos that require the most maintenance are the P2Ks. The main issue beyond the problem with cracked gears and axles, is the power pickup degrades with age.
I’ve tried everything to correct the power pickup issues: replacing the wheels, track wipers, replacing the power trucks with other brands (Atlas, Athearn), conductive lubricant in the power trucks at the contact points, adding wheel wipers, using one of the new power capacitor decoders from Lenz, and replacing the entire mechanism and only keeping the shell.
Each of these techniques works to some degree, but the most effective has been using a Lenz Gold superpack decoder ( http://www.tonystrains.com/products/lenz_decs.htm ), or simply replacing the entire mechanism with a ProtoPower West mechanism ( http://www.ppw-aline.com/loco_ref.htm ).
Unfortunately, the two most effective techiques are also the most expensive. The Lenz Gold superpack decoder is $75 at Tonys Trains Exchange, and the mechanism replacement is about $90.
In short, if I can find the loco another way that doesn’t involve using a P2K, I’ll do it. Sometimes, I don’t have any choice, so I do what I have to do, knowing I need to be pre-emptive in dealing with the P2K maintenance issues.
Thanks guys. I appreciate the response. I’ll go back and check the installation of the square bronze bushings.
Joe I forgot to mention these were brand new in box units and they are DC so there are no decoders installed.
Thanks for your replies . Problem solved. I checked the bushings , I even took the shell off to check the soldered wire connections to the trucks because I had 1 GP7 with this problem. No visible problems all seemed well. Then I began looking at the wheels. Well to me they seemed clean. But I ran the brass wire cleaning brush over one of them until they shone…and …Voila!..that was it. It worked. I guess my perception of clean and what clean should be was somewhat different. All of these were new old stock so the wheels must have oxidized more than I thought. I did this to the other P2k’s and they ran like they were brand new out of the box. Boy do I feel humbled by that. Next time I’l check both my track and wheels before I go any farther. Well you learn a little every day. Thanks again.