anyone ever found they had a poor puller after milling out some weight to install sound? just curious to know if it’s a concern or not. thanks!
removing weight will always lessen your traction, and thus your ability to pull cars without wheelspin. Depending how much weight you take out the loss can be minimal and usually you wont hardly notice it. However you can usually find space to add more weight afterwards. BB’s work well for adding weight to small, irregular spaces.
Of course, no surprises there, it is simple physics. At an operating session I replaced the layout owners Proto2000 E6 with mine because mine has sound. Leaving the staging area 9 about a 3% grade it was spinning and slipping. The owner said, “Mine never has that problem.” I just replied, “Yours doesn’t have sound”. I reached over an just laid a finger on the loco and it took off like a shot. That small amount of weight can make a pretty substantial difference. This particular train had a dummy “B” unit, but usually model trains are over powered. I’ve got an AB set of F units that can pull about 50 cars, but usually they only pull 8-10. So would adding sound to both units and lowering their capacity by 10 or 15 cars be a concern? Absolutely not.
I’ve also got an ABBA unit where one of the "B"s is nothing but a very heavy hard to pull low frequency speaker. I still can’t imagine any reasonable train on the layout that the set couldn’t pull. The longest passing track is about 40 cars.
My first sound installation was one of the first MRC steam decoders into a Spectrum light 4-8-2 (HO). To get everything to fit I ended up removing the tender weight. This caused major problems with the tender picking up power from the track properly, and eventually I had to remove the sound decoder and put the weight back in. (I’ll probably try it again as this is an engine I use a lot, either use the Soundtraxx ‘drop-in’ sound decoder/speaker package designed for the Spectrum engines, or move the speaker into the area below the coal load.)