ugh...my Bachmann 36 ton Shay...

I think I warned you about that. I have housings, but we need to determine how much else is bad.
I can rebuild these almost in my sleep.
With axles still in, roll the wheels with your thumbs. If they turn, axle gear is broken.
We need to address that, too.
The metal end plates and motor fit in either way, but it is specific to the end the coupler is on, so take a photo or make a drawing.
Remove shaft covers and side shafts. Remove couplers and mounts.
Remove brake beams (two screws each end), remove end beams (two tiny screws flat head, Phillips, straight down on the ends), remove side frames (one screw low in middle from the side) then work upwards.
Drive pins out in upper corners of housing..start, see where the knurl is, if no knurl, go the other way. Drop wheels and axles out (note axle gear and bevel gear orientation...different assembly front and rear trucks...and #2 axle only drives driveshafts) but put a rag around the truck first to catch the pickup BB's. Slide metal plates, motor and idler gear assembly out after disconnecting 90 degree brass bit from pickups (slides straight out).

Hope that's right...did it from memory.

 

Just so you know now...the metal trucks are noisier. There is no plastic box to muffle the sound.
Do NOT just throw away your old trucks! Sideframes, brake beams, side shaft..and most importantly, axles and wheels, motors, are fully interchangeable. If you split an axle gear on the new ones, you will have spares. Just box the old ones up in the box the new ones came in, mark the end of the box as to contents, and put on a shelf.

 

I have one of the first runs. Trucks fell apart. Tried to get new truck under there life time warranty. What a joke! New trucks cost me $50.00 plus the old ones.
Bachmann tried to blame me for the trucks falling apart. When I got it it sat in a glassed in case and never ran. It is still in the case.

Don

 

I had one of the absolute first engines out of the first shipment to TrainWorld. They had had my credit card for YEARS waiting for this to come in. 30 days later, washers, bushings, housing were all busted. Howard Lee Riley, when I got him on the phone, told me I was using wrong lubricant (they didn't yet have their lube kits out). So, I read him off the bottle: "LaBelle Plastic Compatible Oil". Stopped that issue right now. Sent me parts, they failed (washers and bushings), so a kit was developed to not only prevent that, but to fix the stupid gauge issue.
G1MRA is 1.575" back-to-back, check gauge wing rail to guard rail is 1.535". Shays were about 1.530", altho some (suspect QC procedures) were a whole lot less. Properly gauged switches, they'd jump straight up.
Once the washer kits were installed, very little failure issues, and I now have two first run (vertical incandescent bulb in headlamp housing versus horizontal LED) that run every single ops session.
Bachmann always tries to blame the consumer.....at least in Large Scale.
Solder, strain reliefs, circuit boards, piXX poor quality components, all that. Heislers...."lopping" (not me that said that....but the driveline "lopes") due to very loose components, and contact springs for chuff (that can't work anyway), and counterweights.....Climaxes with locked drivelines geared to both trucks...and originally 50 hours of break-in required...and before you got to 50, they'd break parts.....I could go on and on.....and on...and on....

 

It's a shame that they go threw all the time and trouble make a nice engine then build it like crap!

 

and still gave awards for "excellence" to the designer.

 

Depends on the loco. Either or both.
Climax: First run, driveshafts geared to each truck and straight through the centre gearbox. Ended up stripping gears in the trucks or snapping u-joints, all of which rapidly became unobtainium. Fix was a slip joint, which, if you derailed, could (and did) sling the square plastic bit into the dense underbrush.
Oh...and the chuff contacts...in the ends of the cylinders...connected in parallel. At a 90 degree crank, IF they worked, it would be chuff-chuff-blank-blank.....and both contacts would close to give you one chuff at Warp Factor 8, just before it all exploded.
Rip out the contacts (which also caused pauses when piston rods compressed them) and do something else.

Heisler...biggie is the manual....showed how to oil the trucks...and a lube port in one bulkhead to get to one motor bearing...that was snapped into the bulkhead....but production units have no such hole. Full teardown of both trucks to oil that bearing (and Howard told me once that bearing, on the brush end, is the most critical point for lube on the Bachmann Mabuchis) is about 2 hours, if you know what you're doing.
I tear them apart and drill the silly lube port.
Chuff contacts.....again, 90 degree crank....chuff-chuff-blank-blank, and the contact tension flipped the counterweights and driveshafts around when you passed TDC. Rip the contacts out and do something else.
Oh..and the "new design" pickups...have little rollers in spring loaded cages...with pins on both sides of the roller...and no place does any manual tell you to oil them...and guess what?
I remove them for what I do (no track power whatsoever) and I used to send boxes of them to Irv in Service to fix customer locomotives as Bachmann had no parts. Until the head office found out and put a stop to it.

Shay......how much do you want to know? Two truck or three truck?
Outside framed 2-8-0?
K-27?

None of those are in production, none of this will affect Bachmann sales, Howard is gone, but they are doing everything "in-house" now...like the LS Peter Witt trolley that burns the main circuit board up in normal use..mine lasted 30 minutes.

 

This is all quite interesting. I only have one Bachmann G gauge, a gear broke in a derailment and rather than repair since parts aren't available they simply sent a new loco. My Dad kept it in a cabinet for a few years and then gave it to me. After converting to Airwire I will run it along with the rest of my G gauge equipment. I also have some HO Bachmann, one of them a K4 Pacific. It is one of the nicest running locos I have. Interesting to me that so many are having these kinds of problems.

Rick H.

 

Well.....your gear probably did not break in a derailment. Even if it did, why would someone design a part that would break in a derailment?

You didn't say what specific engine it was.....but it is far more common a problem that you would think.

EVERY LS 2-8-0 I have seen eventually has broken gear issues and sometimes other things. Early ones the motors could fall off the gearbox (there was a fix published to address that by somebody..).
Wait until you come across regrind plastic.
Or PRC wiring/soldering/circuit board combinations and normal vibration.
How well or long do your LS smoke units last?

I just reworked a 4-6-0 that required a whole lot of gussets, glue and clamping to save the boiler...I had a spare, but not same color.

I always wondered since nobody ever has any issues with any Bachmann product why I have boxes and boxes and boxes of stripped out engines for parts....and spares....

I don't use Hairwire....rather another brand, for about 22 years now, and one of the better things you can do is to bypass the pickups, wheels, plating, and wiring to give better performance.

Kinda like folks who ride motorcycles..there are those that crashed, and those that will.

If you haven't had any issues, you'd best be knocking on wood.

 

Well here are some photos of my Bachman 0-4-0 from the Spectrum line. It was picked up by the Grannyville RR before my CBAM&J aquired it. So far I like it a lot. Also attached, I hope, are a few shots of my U-25 headed for the same RR but currently in the shop for re-paint along with batteries and Airwire. Sorry but it just works well for me.

 

I have a pile of steam 0-4-0's from these guys. And a pile of parts from units. Best thing I ever did with them is to make a Vulcan Duplex from a pair of chassis.
Wait until you get one that waddles.
Main axle gear (if I recall) is out of round...eventually smooths up when the shaking knocks the screws loose in the gearbox.
It is always entertaining to open a NEW unit, primarily outside framed 2-8-0's, followed by 4-4-0 and larger 2-6-0, followed by Shays, followed by at least 5 versions of the 4-6-0, followed by Porters...and inspect the hub on the axle gear before you even run it. All the way around. You will most likely find (unless somehow arrangements were made to insure that only I ever got the units through here so afflicted) the PLASTIC gear hub is cracked. So what, you will say to yourself....but if you know the plastic they use starts to shrink as soon as they pop it out of the mold.....and press the gear onto a steel (or reasonable facsimile thereof) axle.....and it continues to shrink.....and that hub crack you thought nothing of...radiates slowly outwards...and the nano-second the crack hits the valley between two teeth it's gone.
Maybe the crack was ALMOST there and a derailment occurred....and finished the job.
Take a close look next time you have one open.
Why do you think NWSL bothered to tool up to make 4-4-0, 2-6-0, 2-8-0 and Shay axle gears?

 

Should give you some idea of what to look for.