With the arrival of the Atlas 4-4-0s, and thier excellent performance, it has come time to do something with my small fleet of Bmann 4-4-0s. They run good and have excellent drawbar pull, but they suffer from electrical pick-up issues. The pick-up foot print is barely one inch so non powered frogs are a curse as is any slight dirt on the track. So now that I have some new small power it is time to play. I have spare tenders from two kitbashes of 4-4-0s into 4-6-0s and a few more from other projects. The Bmann locos were purchased back when they were cheap so not much to risk messing up or losing. So my starting point is this small fleet. I decided to build auxillary tenders. So I started by stripping out a few of the tenders completely. Next I assembled the weights to replace the stock weight and motor and added styrene channel to cradle the weights. I also cut the drawbar loop off the front of the tender. I soldered wire harvested from some thin earbud wires that I have used previously for similar wiring. I opened up the rear coupler box cast into the car body to take a MT 1015 and I mounted a unimate coupler on the inside of the front where the drawbar loop had been cut off. Puts the Unimate at the same heigth as the rear 1015 and will hook to another Unimate on the rear of the motorized tender.
Here you are looking at the underside of a motorized tender. The two small strips of brass in center of the photo are old coupler springs from LL locos that had been converted to 1015s. These will be soldered on to the ends of the wires, once the length has been determined and will slip under the brass pick-up strips on the motorized tender. The brass retaining plate for the tender coupler has to go for the obvious reason of a short and will be replaced by styrene. I weighted the motor and weight that came out of the tender and found that the replacement weight was a little light. So some Tungsten putty was also placed in the tenders to be just a bit heavier than the original. Next I started the installation of the front deck and end piece. And lest I forget the the black is a small piece of electrical tape since the metal weight was found to be conductive and everything is tight and close. New tops and raised water fill.
Hi john I don't know if this will help but I changed the springs on my tender. The original springs melted. I put in steel springs I guess came from concor couplers from trucks. the gauge is bigger and seem to be stiffer and better.
Shot from underneath. Using the Unimates as a drawbar and the white at the rear of the motorized tender is now styrene. Top view with the tenders coupled and the wires between them just visable. Have to adjust the Unimate on the motorized tender some. And the almost finished project. Found I had the wires a bit too short so an adjustment has been made. The Unimates when coupled together do have quite a bit of swivel side to side without the coupler moving at all. The auxillary tender has a screw type Unimate while the motorized tender has the T shank version. Electrical pick-up is now from a previous footprint of a little less than 1 inch to almost 3 inches. Tomorrow time for coupler adjustment, see if the wires need to be raised any and the test track to see how it navigates the switches and the non powered frogs. I also need to add that the electrical conductivety was checked at every step with a 9 volt battery. url=http://www.trainboard.com/railimages/showphoto.php/photo/157880/title/bmann-4-4-0-auxillary-tender/cat/910][/url] This is one of my Bmanns with the retro'd MT pilot currently with a Kato coupler that will get changed out. This works out in the testing tommorow the 4-6-0s are next.
This has not been a problem I've experienced with these but I do have a box of springs if needed. Almost sounds like you had a voltage spike occur.
its somthing to do with the club layout there electrical isn't the greatest. they use some power hogger that can put out 20 vdc they use it to power three lines so the power is shifty alot.
Call this chapter two of as the Stomach Turns, or into this life some rains must fall, but why is it always a cloudburst. Started testing this AM and all was going fine until I started having issues getting through the switches and any slight curvature. After some messing with things I came to the conclusion that the pilot truck was causing problems. First found the front axle has stopped turning and then on examination found this. First time I have had this happen but I did observe that the wheel composition was not the typical plastic I am familar with. Hmm could this be impending signs of future problems with these older locos. Went to the parts box and found a spare and pressed it onto the axle and then cleaned the axle shaft and the truck base slot it fits in plus lubed it. That done it was back on the track. Suddenly I'm having tractive issues with nothing but the tender and auxillary lashed on behind. Up until this time I had it creeping at less than an inch or two a minute so the extra pick-up was doiung it's job and I crept it through the non powered frogs. After a lot of tweaking and adjusting I still could not get it moving with the drivers with all four traction tires spinning like mad. Came to the conclusion that the way I had the wires attached to the brass strips were causing excess drag on the tender wheels. So the concept works like a champ but my engineering totally fails in this case. So back to the drawing board. Also continue to have issues with those danged rerailers so a rebuild of the test track that was slated for later has been moved up. So two new switches in the crossover on the dual track and I will take one rerailer and deepen the slots with a dremel cut off wheel.
yea I dont know john about that wheel I never had that happen although I had the points on the wheel sets grind off while running a 2-6-0 athearn loco on the tender. So the wheel did not stay in .
A couple things.... I've got some spare parts including a full lead truck, I think, left over from parting out a couple of these. Doesn't roll well, but its intact. I've had three of them and none of them were really worth the work. I've heard that the newest ones are 'better' but the basic design of the tender trucks is so bad it's borderline unsalvageable in my opinion. They are so wide in the treads they short out switches, they pivot so poorly they derail, and they don't roll for anything. I've also got a full leftover MicroAce/Atlas 2-6-0 tender, I think... but when you get right down to it, if you need more pickup behind one of those 4-4-0's, maybe you should consider using some Kato caboose parts and dummy up one of those Bachmann tank cars as a water tender (3 vertical tank one). The Kato caboose trucks are truly excellent rolling pickup sets just like the Kato tender. I've used them under my 2-6-0 tender and also under the flatcar/boom tender for my burro crane, for the exact same problems you have here with electrical pickup. By the time you really attack all the problems here you'll find out you've invented the Atlas 4-4-0 tender. I think Bachmann did a perfectly creditable job with the locomotive design except 'maybe' the lead truck, but that tender.... I was just giddy with that Atlas tender when I saw the wheels. It may take a while, but someday they will be on the Atlas spare parts list, then, look out. Another alternative is to steal the pickup truck from the Kato 11-105/6/7 chassis including grinding off the sideframes. That's another excellent, free-rolling, end-axle to spring-wiper truck design with 27" wheels and a 5'6" wheelbase. I put one of those under a scale test car and permanently wired it to my Trackmobile as a pickup car, also worked excellently. There's threads out there on all of these, I'll repost the pictures if it's useful.
Thanks for the sugestions which I'll keep in mind. I am already deep into re-engineering my work. The firts thing that I believe was the issue was the wheels Vs the brass pickups. Trying to slip, albeit a very thin brass strip, under them at the rear may just be raising that brass strip to high and rubbing the wheels thus causing drag. Multiply that times two for both tenders. So I have already cut a small channel that allows the wire and a little bit of solder to lay in and then channeled all the way to the rear deck. The brass strips have been resecured on the first tender and already I see an improvement in that the strips lay flat as designed. You notice that I haven't even touched the bashed 4-6-0s. Those are my pride and joy in the performance department except for pick-up. Those little gals will outpull and out climb everything I have in the steam roster and most of the diesel. So I'm playing with the little cheap 4-4-0s that I have had laying around for a long while to work out the problems of pick-up. And if I totally destroy one in the process no loss. Will be either a scrap loco behind the engine house or piled up at the bottom of a trestle. But if I mess up those Ten Wheelers then there shall be darkness and clouds in the gulch along with the sounds of crying and lamenting along with the knashing of teeth.
Well after the re-engineering job last night and this AM I have great electrical pick-up but the same issue of the tender basically dragging its wheels. Tried a couple of other 4-4-0s on the same tender lash-up with the same results of driver spinning like mad and going nowhere so that eliminates any issue of the traction tires and the first loco. For the heck of it I broke out a couple of my other ones with no mods to the tender including the kit bashed tenwheelers that would pull the walls down. Suddenly I have issues with all of them. After spending a lot of time trying different things from stronger springs to carefully examining the tender wheelsets I have come to the conclusion that the problem lies with the tender wheelsets. While there is no evidence of corrosion something has happened to all of them while in storage for awhile. When you have two locos that have three axles with all traction tires and the extra weight stuffed in and they had previously crawled up an over 30% grade in my former local hobby shop, in front of witnesses, and now won't pull the tender something has happened that I don't have an answer for. These locos are all ones that are the slightly newer version that has the T shaped drive shaft rather than the old thick hex socket drive shaft but not Bmanns supposedly newer version. Something appears to have caused a swelling in the wheel assembly whereby the wheels now rub against the rest of the truck. When the metal piece is removed from the truck frame the wheels turn just fine. Assembled not. Now I would be ready to accept that somewhere I had messed up in my engineering but when I have one that was NIB, with the factory air still in the box, and still has the old rapido on the tender, and it has the same issue without my doing anything but put it on the track and apply power then something is definitely afoot in the old Falls Gulch. I wonder if the metal part that holds the wheels is chrome painted, or plated Zimac. I don't have anything else at this moment to explain why all of the locos, all about ten years old, would suddenly have the issue with the tender wheels. The one thing I do have at this point is plenty of time, being retired, to mess with these things and I will explore the possibilties of slipping the motor into another tender from my box of old tenders and coming up with a set of pick-up trucks. Still would leave me with a short wheel span for pick-up though. I even tried double heading two before supper this evening and with the drag that the tenders had on thier locos I doubt that I could pull one car.
Years ago (we're talking original run Bachmann 4-4-0) I saw the same problem; the tender wheels quit turning and started to drag. I attributed it to wear on the insides of the wheels and the metal pickup casting, never considered casting swelling, but it could be. I simply sold the locomotive and gave up on anything that small until the Atlas 2-6-0 (Microace) showed up. 3 possible approaches I see.... 1) Replacing Bachmann tender with Atlas 2-6-0 tender. Nearly the same size and design and no problem with wheels, but only last 4 actually pick up in original design without modification. Rolls great, room for motor relocation. I have an intact spare with wheels I'm willing to deal. On the one I kept I modified the front four to pickup as well. 2) New tender floor using Kato caboose frame and caboose trucks; will be too high, require more mods, but excellent pickup 8x8 and rolling qualities. See my 'scratchbuilding HVRR #5' thread on Trainboard for the details on construction. It's paired with an Atlas 2-6-0 chassis for size comparison. (I ended up finding a much smaller motor/gearhead combo that worked wonderfully instead of the mashima in the photo) That's still too big for most 4-4-0's. 3) Hold out and wait for Atlas 4-4-0 tenders to show up, they appear to have beaten the rolling and pickup issues nicely for a tender that tiny and have 24" wheels as well.
Randy, Please could you let us know how you modified the front wheels to pickup of the Atlas/MicroAce 2-6-0 tender? Fotos would be great! Thank you in advance, Franz
Sitting and pondering the issue last evening I took out two of the tender trucks and put them on a smooth surface and gave them a little nudge. Nothing. So essentially the locomotive was dragging 8 non turning wheels, and with the other tender attached 16 non turning wheels. That it actually moved along the track, although with drivers spinning, does say that there was nothing wrong with the tractive effort for such a small loco. A close examination reveals that every wheel is contacting some part of the truck frame somewhere. As you point out there are several options plus a couple more. One option would be to install the motor in the smallest Bmann tender available which wouldn't be too bad for the larger kitbashed 4-6-0s and are the ones I'm interested most in salvaging. The slopeback tender has close to the right ride level on the floor, or the smallest available rectangular tender. Would be great if the new 2-6-0 tender was to become available. The rectangular tender offers the best option because of the inside contacts plus 8 wheel pick-up. Another option may be to contact Bmann and see if the tender trucks are available separately. However there I don't know that I might not be buying the same problem now or later. My next option is what I will try today. Broke out the Dremel speed controller and assorted grinding attachments. I'll take the trucks apart, remove the wheels, and gently grind the offending areas to gain some clearance on the truck frame with it reassembled sans wheels. Then put it all back together and see if it rolls. Then there is always shelve the whole project and hope that Atlas comes out with the complete tender with motor later as at first glance it appears to be probably the best fit of all my options. I don't believe the Bmann motor will fit into the Atlas tender so I would need the whole shebang. Of course this is also a good reason to simply acquire another couple of Atlas 4-4-0s although a look at the mechanism with another TenWheeler kitbash seems prohibitive at the moment.
I'd done some heavy-duty mods on my tender trucks before I gave up, but for different reasons. The 'wheel treads' are so wide, and the gauge so narrow, that I attempted to grind the wheel treads narrower and move the entire casting thingies WIDER toward the truck sideframes to increase the gauge and make it stop shorting out on insulated-frog Atlas switches. To hold it all together, I drilled through the metal into the delrin and stitched it together with .010 brass wire, ACC'd in place. It did fix the problem with it shorting out over turnouts and derailing, but the tender still didn't roll, it dragged. That was pretty much the last straw for me. One more thing for you to consider here.... The 'ultimate drive' for my 2-6-0 project was not the Mashima or even the Faulhaber motor - but the 12v motor out of the Kato 11-105 chassis, paired up with a Gizmoszone 5.14:1 gearhead that matches perfectly to the motor. The gizmoszone gearhead comes with a 3v motor, but the casing is the same size and drilled the same as the Kato 12v, or for that matter, the 12v motor available separately for the GE 44-tonner (that one is double shafted, but its the same motor). This at least appears to be the same motor as in the Atlas 4-4-0, we'll see. That motor/gearhead package is so tiny I'm convinced it would fit in the empty Atlas 2-6-0 tender. The torque/RPM out of that combination is just phenomenal, the best I've ever seen for such a tiny combination. I have a YouTube video of it out under 'randgust' for the HVRR #5 project, from slow speed to flat out. It would run a bit faster with a 4-4-0. I've also used it in Tomytec diesel chassis drives, love it, dead silent, extreme torque and speed control with a rational top speed. The entire Kato chassis is $24, which would be OK even if all you got was the motor. The Gizmoszone motor/gearhead is $14 http://www.gizmoszone.com/shopping/agora.cgi?product=Gearmotor;ppinc=1g and even if you throw out the 3v motor, its still a deal. I have tried a dropping resistor instead of swapping the motor and while it works, the resistor heat convinced me that was not the way to go here. This combo will go to full slip without any drop at all in motor rpm or increase in heat, it's a 'set it and forget it' on the throttle, it doesn't budge under load. Here's the 'final fit' in the HVRR 5 tender: Remember, I tried a Mashima, a Faulhaber and this, and this outperformed the other two. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtJfRmyF1-o
I'll have to dig through my original Atlas 2-6-0 photos to find the details, but basically I fabricated a piece of .010 wire like a 'pizza hut roof' shape and put it in the lead truck as an axle wiper on the first two wheels. That got me two more wheels on one side of the tender picking up. But the real thing I discovered in working with the Microace/Atlas designs is that drawbar wire wiper is not all it is cracked up to be. When I hotwired around it (particularly the 2-6-0) I discovered that 70% of my pickup glitches went away. A round brass wire on a zamac casting, moving, sliding, bucking, is not a reliable methodology....period, for a microscopic area of electrical contact. Doesn't matter if the motor is in the tender or the locomotive. So I drilled out 00-90 under the cab area, put in a couple round-headed screws, tried some jumper wires, and bang, problem solved. I've had two more Atlas 2-6-0's to play with since... same conclusions. And I think I'll do the same thing to the Atlas 4-4-0 as well. That drawbar design looks good, but it's not as good as you think it is if you hotwire around it and compare. Where it particularly went bad is the vertical movement when either the locomotive or tender is jostled going across a switch resulting in a bounce on that drawbar. I also hotwired around the Kato Mikado, same design, same results, making sure I have access to the screws under the cab with a jewelers screwdriver so I can separate loco and cab when I need to.
Well I have finished grinding about everything from the backs of the plastic sideframe to the areas where I could see the wheel flange contacting the metal part. Also went a bit further and took a little bit off the wheels themselves at the point where they contacted the plastic sideframe. Replaced everything and where the metal frame has a pin that sets in the plastic I used a drop of ACC to resecure it since once you take the piece out that holds the wheels I does not seem to want to fit as tight as before. One thing I did notice with the plastic part was the lousy casting or workmanship of this part. One of the areas where the flange was touching enough to cause drag. While the ACC sets I'll have a little lunch and come back and assemble the set on a tender and see what happens. One thing that has been a lifesaver has been the speed controller for all the grinding because otherwise I would have been hand filing. One of the other things that has passed through my mind was looking at doing wipers on the drivers which may be possible although with the traction tires I don't know how much could be obtained with the flanges having the only contact.
I've had two more Atlas 2-6-0's to play with since... same conclusions. And I think I'll do the same thing to the Atlas 4-4-0 as well. That drawbar design looks good, but it's not as good as you think it is if you hotwire around it and compare. Where it particularly went bad is the vertical movement when either the locomotive or tender is jostled going across a switch resulting in a bounce on that drawbar. I also hotwired around the Kato Mikado, same design, same results, making sure I have access to the screws under the cab with a jewelers screwdriver so I can separate loco and cab when I need to. I had some intermitet pickup problems with my Kato mike also. Found that the drawbar was a a bit loose where it contacted the tender pick-ups . I ended up bending that end out a bit to get better contact and I also tightened up the loco end to get better contact on the pin. I've also adjusted a couple B-mann locos in the same manner. Hadn't thought about adding wires . Also found out that it helps to make sure the post on the loco is is clean. Lot of time they come from the factory with a bit of paint on them. John, I'm willing to bet that you looked at trying Kato trucks under the tender? .....Mike
