Technically, GE created a great design for the locomotive. They were phenomenal motors. But their lines sucked. Face it, engineers are great problem solvers, but artists we ain't. LOL But I think they're beautiful, second only to the Little Joes.....sigh.
I have one ..... I almost don't want to touch it out of fear of showing you all that I am quite the hack. Of course Ron would be totally polite and say nice job...
Yes, I have a video. Just a bit of history for anyone who does not know. The locomotive above is not an NJ Custom Brass EP-2 from 1983. Around the year 2000, Kumata made a new revised version. I bought a bunch and then completely rebuild them. A good bit of the story is found at Spookshow- about halfway down. http://www.spookshow.net/loco/njep2.html I don't have a video of E4 above, but here is a video of E5 (went to the same customer). The old NJCB EP-2 would barely pull itself without traction tires. Here's a particularly bad one- would not even pull itself. I rebuilt it for a customer and at least got it to run and pull something. Here is the old and the new Kamata. And here is the repaired old version.
Nice! So what ended up being the problem with the early 80s version? Looking at the video it reminded me of a problem I had with one of my Little Joes, where the fourth axle rode a little too low so those wheels were just so slightly lifting off the 2nd and 3rd axles (and my 4th axle is unpowered so that left a single axle trying to do the pull) I did a re-design to make sure that 4th axle is now slightly higher so not only does it not do that on the flat, but also on transition to an incline it doesn't lift the power wheels. Four axle bogies are finicky to work with because of that (in my opinion) Your post mod units are solid!
Thank you. Yep. That was one problem. I had to take careful measurements and a small file and work on the truck frame so that the weight was on the two driven axles. The problem with the 83 version is that the 4-axle truck only had two axles powered. Well, if those two axles were not solidly on the rails, then you were toast. Now, I do a lot more. I add wipers and a circuit board. And if you do DCC, then adding decoders to EACH cab allows you to speed match them so they don't work against each other. Motors that do not run at the same speed is a potential curse in all multi-motor locos. Best examples besides this one are: Kumata Centipede and OMI Little Joe. If your motors run at about the same speed, then great. But if they don't, loco is noisy and pulling goes dramatically down.
