Hi my name is Carl and I am a trainaholic and have been model railroad involved since I was 6 years old. I know where to solder a grey / orange motor wires when the motor is still in the cage and loco. However, I have pulled one out of my parts box and need to wire it for a decoder. I think I have read somewhere that the bottom of a motor will be painted white, that may be a pipe dream(?). So my question is how to tell which side is up and which side is down. I can put a battery to turn the shaft but I have no clue which direction a KATO motor should turn to go forward. Any help is appreciated, please. BTW this is in a KATO SD-90/43, also there is no paint of any color on this motor.
I visualize which direction the gears on the wheels are going, when the loco is going forward, and so, the gears driving those are going the opposite and gears driving those would be going the same direction as the wheel gears and so on until you get to the worm gear. Then you can determine which direction the spiral on the worm needs to be traveling (forward or backward) to turn the worm gear in the correct direction and which direction the worm needs to be turning to make the spiral travel in the correct direction. The motor shaft needs to turn in the same direction. Clear? Doug
Doug, Yep, clear as mud !! Actually I do understand, I just had not thought of it that way. Thanks for comment.
Don't forget that when you are done if the loco goes the wrong way you can easily change the direction with DecoderPro or by changing CV 29 another way.. https://ncedcc.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/200537669-CV29-Explained Sumner
You can change the direction in CV 29, But the best way is to reverse the motor leads. A year from now you will have a problem with the loco, do a decoder reset and can not figure out why it runs backwards, and will not remember that you change CV 29 way back when.
I’ve done this. It sucks. It’s actually on my to do list to take apart and redo the soldering and get it the right way. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
