Do ya ever want to take something you just got and smash it against the wall in frustration? I just received my recent purchase from our wonderful Walmart of Trains, Ebay and on to the track she went! A beautiful 2-6-6-2 Mallet from ...Bachmann. Looked great, ran like....! THe front set of drivers nearly locked up with each rotation of the drivers. I emailed the seller who responded within 1 hour offering to make it right. Thankfully I took the initiative and pulled the cover of the front gear tower, hooked the loco up to a DC supply and spun the drivers whileI brushed out the gear teeth with a fairly stiff paint brush. Out comes a huge sliver of plastic flash getting ground up in the front gear tower. After a tiny drop of lube and proper quartering of the side rods, back on the track and there she has stayed, purring like a kitten. Now it's the smoothest Bachmann with DCC I own. Go figure.
Was the loco new or second-hand? If the latter, I'd personally always assume that some amount of cleanup/maintenance would be necessary prior to operation. Glad to hear you were able to get it running right so quickly though!
With my luck, it would have exploded and destroyed everything within a 10' radius. Hmm... with my luck, I would've won two of 'em...
In truth? That is why when women are not around so do I. Women, for some reason dig / are attracted to steam locos. Not sure why. UPCLARK, Eagle, and Kisatachi - Nice to see you guys again.
I could offer a primal psychological explanation, but this is a family forum with many young members, e.g. Steve, Ken, etc. :tb-tongue:
My luck with steam locos isn't good either. I've had more than my fair share of steam misfortune. It's all diesel for me now. Kisatchie & Miss Dee, great to see you on TrainBoard ! Keith
This one is brand new. I never intentionally buy used. I did recently buy a a ConCor 4-8-4 that was advertised as new but amazingly the lead truck was so packed up with crud, I had to use an exacto to chizel it off. It took hours to get it to run remotely acceptably. I advised the seller. I haven't heard from him again. Poof! Gone like magic smoke. I won't be buying from him again.
Thanks Old Grey One. I haven't really gone anywhere. I visit the site probably 3 or 4 times a day. I just don't say much if I can't add anything relevant or constructive to the conversation. I do have a few Deisels relevant to the era, some F-3's, F-7's and SD-9'sand an E-9. I do need a few more 1st gen deisels. "You don't learn much when you're talking all the time."
You have unwittingly stumbled onto an amazing way to "break-in" locomotives. Radical, yes - but look at the results!
If you're going to run steam, you almost certainly are going to have to do a bit of tweaking, cleaning, worrying, etc. It's like owning an old Jaguar XKE (well, not that bad) or some other vintage sports car. I have 10 Walthers/LifeLike Berks, all of which run like a dream, but all of which needed major work to pull more than a half-dozen cars (a Berk on the front of a six-car train is an abomination; it needs 25-30 behind it). My Kato Mikes also run perfectly, but pulled nothing until Kato released the traction tire fix. My Bachmann 2-8-0's pull like the dickens and run very smoothly, but one of them had to be sent back because of a clunk in the driveline I never could fix (I think it was a bad idler gear). My Walthers 0-8-0's needed weight and tweaking of the wires to the tender to pull their best; now they run like a charm and pull 20 cars. Took days to get them that way. My Kato GS-4 wobbles. Still haven't figured that one out. So does my brass Key Berk, though less than the Kato. Both have sprung drivers, and they will pull a ton - 50 cars no problem. But you have to ignore the wobble. I just don't look. My Walthers 2-8-8-2's sound terrific; but have a very weird startup-shutdown sequence and odd throttle control. They run great, though, and pull well without modification. My Athearn Challenger is the only steam loco that I literally have done nothing to mechanically. It ran and pulled absolutely perfectly out of the box and has continued to do so years later. Too bad the NKP didn't have any! My 30 or so Atlas GP7's, GP9's, SD9's, and RS11's, on the other hand, ran perfectly out of the box, and never need anything. Wonder if this is the way the real railroads saw the transition to diesel . . . John C.
It is a shame that something that has that type of pricetag should be so plagued by quality control issues. But flash seems to be one. The flash probably was off the engine chassis and most likely nobody was checking the parts and cleaning up prior to assembly. You had luck twice. One in that the seller responded and two that you found the problem before something bound up so tight it stripped gears or worse. Might as well try for the magic three times and buy a lottery ticket. But the lack of quality control is not confined to just loco mechanisms but to after market parts. I shall not name the manufacturer of plastic trucks and couplers but I have been noticing a lot of issues with excessive flash on thier products and castings in the last several years. And it is getting to be a pain in the you know where to have to try and clean up coupler parts before assembly or to trim excessive flash off of a bolster spacer so a truck sets level.
Steve (and Hank) I may have an answer suitable for publication . . . My wife loves trains, especially a particular class of locomotive that used to operate over here but any train will do. She loves the sound of drums, too. Now, at certain speeds of locomotive, and at certain rhythms of drumming, the sound is virtually the same. Try, for example, the beat in PAINT IT BLACK from the Rolling Stones, and it should illustrate what I mean. Regards, Pete Davies
Good we have a happy ending here. Grey One, You are absolutely correct about steam and women. My wife the CFO of my model railroading adventures said what do you have that loco for? She was referring to an N Scale RS-1. The only diesel I own. She said it wasn't nice looking! Don't buy anymore of those! Never thought about that incident until today???? Jim lol
to be honest, i not only want. occasionally i do. out of memory : - an atlas gp38 - a bosch battery drill - black&decker saber saw - countless tools - an aztec airbrush - a laptop all went airborne and disintegrated at the concrete wall. but 99.9999% of the time i am peaceful and civilized...
I don't mean to hijack this thread, but Sandro, you triggered an ancient memory. Shortly after we were married some 53 years ago, I had just exited my car after returning from work when a portable sewing machine was launched from our second-floor window, landing near my feet, in more pieces than before manufacture...:tb-ooh: Back to the thread...yes, my wife also prefers all my steamers over any of my diesels. As I said earlier, it must be based on some primal urge established long before recorded history, let alone Sigmund Freud. Pete, I cannot think of how to describe my thoughts on the female attraction to steam in any way suitable for a family publication, so I am happy that you are able. :tb-wink:
T.H.E. Wife on the other hand loves the diesels ! She was born in '63. By the time she could remember any trains...steam had gone the way of the dinosaur ! She loves to go to Flagstaff and stand out back just feet from the track when thousands of horsepower rumble on thru !! Now...that being said...she does have her ONE steam locomotive for her SExcursion Train and the best I can recall her saying about it was that it was ... "Cute". Dontcha hate when your wife/girlfriend/mate/other half looks at something and remarks that its "Cute" ???:tb-wacky:
Sliding ever further off the original topic- Mine also likes steam. Perhaps someone should grab this as an doctoral thesis idea?
