Can We Make This 70 Year Old Wood HO Locomotive Run Again?

well folks in today's video we're gonna be unboxing and working on a 1950s inner urban Doodle Bug some sort of piece of equipment which was actually kit bashed I don't really know a whole lot about this locomotive or whatever it is but I was basically just browsing eBay a couple months ago I found it and I put in a bid I think for around 25 and I ended up winning the auction so uh yeah we'll get this thing out of the box we'll see what kind of condition it's in and then we'll try to fix it all in the same video I am super excited to see what this thing looks like all right so the seller organized all the parts right here and this should be the locomotive itself and there it is check this thing out you really don't see a lot of stuff like this I think it was built out of a kit however you can see that the frame of it is actually made out of wood which is something that you don't see too often anymore the drive appears to be out of a varni locomotive now it's got a rear bogey this is missing some parts hopefully we've already got those but uh yeah I just thought this looked like a very interesting piece of equipment and something that I'd want to own I I love the stuff from the 1950s and uh it's not in perfect shape as you can see but hopefully we can get this thing running again there's just something fascinating about this now before we go repairing anything I just want to quickly mend the rear truck because this is responsible for picking up power many engines of this era use a system where one truck picks a power from one rail and the other from the opposite Rail and we appear to have the parts right here which is perfect we'll get the wheels out of the bag and then we'll just get that all reassembled and then we'll actually be able to figure out if this drive Works judging that it's a Varney I think it's actually got a fair Shake but it's almost undoubtedly going to need maintenance just because of its age a lot of these engines you know they just need oil and cleaning really but I just want to make sure everything's in order I don't know what all this other stuff is but for the time being we'll try to get these back in of course I have no real way of knowing which side is supposed to be insulated so I guess I'll we'll just make a guess and we'll just get this on here if it's wrong we can always change it obviously we probably will have to anyway we'll just try to get this truck back together all right so we got that done I guess we'll take it over to the track and we'll see if this thing can actually power up my expectations are pretty low but let's try it out I'm gonna be very surprised if this locomotive does anything I think in all likelihood it's probably either gonna have a short circuit or it's not going to pick up any power because the wheels are so oxidized but you know I've been surprised by these types of project locomotives before so let's give it a fair Shake here and give it some power and so far it does not seem to be doing anything and uh now we appear to have a bit of a short circuit so that's not so good and there's clearly something not quite right not terribly surprising but we'll have to play around with the wires and everything else a little bit so instead of trying to get this all sorted out I think what I'm going to try to do is remove the roof and we'll see if we can get some leads directly on the motor you know we'll give us a much clearer picture of what exactly is going on with this locomotive I've already got my life Lake controller all set up here we'll get some power flowing through that I got some nice Sparks there so that should be good and we'll just see I can actually already noticed that this spring Has Come Undone so that's obviously not going to work so we'll get that back on there and then we'll try to give it some power I find these locomotives really exciting to work on because they're just such a mystery you know this is something that somebody at some point created you know nothing about it and you open it up and you just start to sort of learn the story of the locomotive and there's something that I just find really fascinating about that in any case we'll get that connected up I don't know if maybe this used to be a piece of insulator and this piece of metal of some sort I don't know what that's about but anyways let's try to give this thing some power my expectations are low but we'll see here did you guys see that it turned a tiny bit all right we're going to give it more powerful 18 or so volts no freaking way this thing runs wow and it doesn't even sound half bad I mean uh judging by how much power we're giving it it probably has high current draw but in comparison to some of the stuff I've worked on that was really easy so I guess what we're gonna try to do now is we'll try to sort the wiring out figure out what's going on with all this stuff and uh then once we do that we'll drop the motor out I think there are a couple screws right here which hold it in place and then we can service the whole Drive get these really filthy Wheels all cleaned up here and hopefully by the end of this video we will have this engine running for the first time in maybe 20 plus years who knows it could be longer like I said this is uh quite an archaic locomotive you just gotta love it though I mean check this out wood-bodied locomotive yeah you know what they say they don't make them like this anymore so I thought about this and I think I'm kind of doing it backwards I think what I should be doing is actually dropping the motor out before working on the wiring just because then we won't have to negotiate around all of this so we're gonna have to get something to hold on to the nut on either side which is holding the motor in place I've got my trusty pliers here and somebody was commenting recently saying SMG you need to replace these things they're terrible and you know I'm not gonna lie they've seen better days but they actually belonged to my great grandfather and they still do the job perfectly they're solid they don't wiggle around which I find some pliers do and it's super annoying when you're trying to work on things like this so uh as far as I'm concerned I don't see any reason to get rid of them but anyways we'll see if we can get this out it's a little bit awkward you're probably supposed to remove the truck covers before doing this now let's see if we can get the other one off this one's a little more stuck all right we've nearly done it here folks I think we're gonna have to de-solder that here we go this thing actually does have some sort of a light fixture that's super cool I didn't notice that at first so anyways we've managed to get the drive freed and despite how kind of grimy it is this is actually turning really well uh which is remarkable everything is in really good shape so obviously you know I want to clean all this stuff up because we don't want this Grime getting caught up in these gears that wouldn't be good but this is just a terrific sign that means there's no buildup of rust or anything like that which is you know one of the last things you want to see when working on a piece of equipment like this all right there's the commutator it's not looking perfect but uh it's kind of to be expected for a locomotive of its age so we'll use this fiberglass pencil just to polish that up and uh we're gonna have a beautiful brass piece of metal by the end of this watch this just like a few seconds of using this tool and it's already removing many layers of grime from years and years of usage foreign just going to quickly clean out the gaps on the commutator using this plastic pick you can find these things at pharmacies and places like that I've had a lot of people asking me but if you can't find them just grab a regular toothpick and shave down the end a little bit it will do the exact same job but really the goal here is just to get any Grime out of these gaps which will cause a short circuit and you just want to make sure you're using something which isn't too sharp because it will if this gets scratched it will cause a lot of problems now this thing was already running half decent before we even cleaned up the commutator but I'm curious to see now that it actually has been properly cleaned how well it's gonna run I mean you would hope it would run better after that you can here's the motor starts to break in a little bit and that's before we've even cleaned up and oiled all the rest of this which I intend to do so let's get to that gonna try to scrape out some of this junk we don't want that getting caught up in there oh there's some 60 year old dust right there that's nice this is exactly what you don't want which is stuff getting caught around moving Parts because if that works its way into the bearings it's gonna drag down the drive quite severely all right so that's all looking a lot better I think now I want to try to open up the gearbox and we'll see how the grease and everything else in there is looking I'm going to suspect it's probably kind of dry but at the same time this whole Drive is turning so well that it must be lubricating to some extent all right so here we are inside honestly there's not really any grease in here which is not fantastic to see but at the same time it's not grimy or anything it's all pretty clean there's a little bit of old lubricant on here and you know this could affect how well power flows so I'm going to clean all of this up right here we'll make it all nice and shiny but otherwise everything in here is looking great these parts don't have a lot of wear on them so I think that this might be a low mileage locomotive I'll just take some Q-tips and rubbing alcohol to clean all the old grease off oh man just look at that well at this point I'm pretty happy with you know what we've gotten out of the locomotive it's uh this was the last one you can see it's definitely a lot better so I think at this point we can pretty much start reassembling everything I do want to clean these wheels off first though foreign didn't come out half bad in my opinion I guess we'll try to get all of this back together cleaned up all of these other parts as well I have a bearing around here I need that I'll just slowly put this thing back together of course adding tons of oil to all these different moving Parts I find with the metal engines which use Metal Gears you really have to be mindful of adding oil and grease because if you're not careful these things can really wear down quickly so after all that cleaning and re-lubrication the drive is turning over almost effortlessly which is really good the magnet's not terribly strong but I think it is going to run half decent we'll connect some wires up here and uh as you can see the thing starts right up you know no problems so at this point I think we can reinstall this drive I've left the truck covers off just so that it will be a little bit easier to get back inside the frame here unfortunately I broke this wire off so we're going to have to solder that back on and we'll also have to resolder this obviously but now that I've also disassembled it seeing that the insulators are on this side right here so we just need to clean these wheels up and this will hopefully work Okay so we've finally got that back in place getting those uh we're getting those bolts back in was a pain in the neck I'm not gonna lie but uh yeah now we can hopefully get this truck reassembled now I was looking through the bag of spare parts here and I found both of these pieces of metal and I'm very confident that these that this went here and this possibly went over that which makes sense because uh as it would have been before this would be too low so that's great news so yeah we'll take this truck back apart I'm gonna clean up those Wheels properly to clean up the journals just to make sure they're in good shape as well and then yeah we'll rewire it and hopefully if we're lucky this thing will run foreign s from falling out as they have been this side is insulated so we want our insulated wheels on this side to be facing that way so you can see there's the insulator you got to make sure both those are opposite to the one on the other truck in this case now I found this screw right here it's a self-tapping screw so I'm I'm pretty sure that was probably what was there before I think we'll just try to get this whole thing back together as is we solder it throw the roof back on as I said if we were lucky it might work looks about right foreign [Music] ered this is really not ideal but there's just not enough slack in this wire to re-cut and solder all of that so unfortunately this is just gonna have to do unless I want to rewire it and then I really don't want to replace these wires this whole braided stuff is just something you don't see anymore and it still probably works fine so you know what if it ain't broke don't fix it so we'll throw the roof back on this thing we'll take it over to the track and if we're lucky this engine might just run again and you know you gotta just wonder how long it's been since this thing rode the rails I mean it's judging by its Condition it's definitely been this way for a while all right well time for the moment of truth I guess I'm so unsure as to whether or not this thing is gonna start you know it's like everything theoretically is in order but at the same time I'm still not 100 sure why it was shorted to begin with but in any case let's give it some power and see what happens and we've got a working headlight but uh the engine doesn't seem to want to go that's weird we've got low current draw something's not quite right here but if we just okay I can hear it now oh okay it's it's not great but that that is something now yeah it's starting to go she's pulling an amp though that's way too much power let's see it might start to drop oh yeah it's starting to speed up it's getting there current draw is coming down it's almost at uh exactly where it's supposed to be yeah check this thing out that's so cool oh I hope we didn't just seize well we lost power again I'm so happy to see it running around the layout well it was running there we go it's got some sort of a problem I think with the brushes but other than that like it's it's doing it and uh the current draw is right in check it's pie for a regular locomotive but uh for an engine of its arrow with an open frame motor like that it's very uh common so that's perfect so yeah I think at this point we can say we have got a runner see if it makes it over this time yes there we go it's getting better by the minute so I'm just gonna let this thing uh run around for uh probably five minutes let it really break in let the lubricants flow around and if we're lucky the curtain draw might even drop a little further but yeah this is just fantastic an engine you know over 60 years old and uh it's running pretty smooth yeah it's definitely getting better wow so the low speed leaves a little bit to be desired and still seems to be getting a bit stuck there so I don't know what's going on with that again I think it might be a problem with one of the brushes but let's get a coupler on this thing and let it pull a little bit of freight or maybe some Passenger cars so I've gone and put together some sort of a train it's not great I mean it's a bunch of different cars from different railroads and the time periods are also not perfect but it's about the best I could do I think they look all right together so let's run this thing as a train now together foreign foreign [Music] [Applause] foreign well folks that's gonna be about it for today's video I hope you all enjoyed I'm absolutely thrilled with how well this thing turned out for a locomotive of its age and in its current condition it runs remarkably well just from breaking in it's actually got its low speed back you know earlier it couldn't really creep but now if we give it just a few volts of power it will creep along just fine which is just remarkable you know even when these things were brand new they wouldn't have been the greatest because they hadn't developed SKU wound Motors or they at least weren't very common so for what it is it is absolutely remarkable that it can go that slow and it's a sign that the drive is in very healthy condition you know same with the current draw it's just where you want it so overall for a 25 random kit bash locomotive uh you really can't complain with that it's just amazing too how well they built these things all it took was a little bit of cleaning and lubrication and we've got this thing back on the rails and I don't really see any reason why it won't be around for another 50 years provided it's taken care of so I think that that's quite an excellent but anyways I hope you all enjoyed and with that I'd like to thank you all so much for watching

Channel: SMT Mainline

Views: 91,617

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Id: FR2idW0cNLk

Length: 25min 38sec (1538 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 09 2022