Can We Make This Southern Pacific Daylight Run? Brass Locomotive

well folks in today's video we're gonna be unboxing and working on a brass Southern Pacific Daylight locomotive that I picked up on eBay a couple months ago I've been on the hunt for a new GS4 locomotive just because I find that my Bachmann gs4s have had a lot of problems especially in terms of derailing and I think it's largely due to the sizes of the flanges being just a little bit too small so I figured for the next daylight locomotive I change things up a little bit try to find something from another manufacturer and I found this one which is in kind of questionable condition from Sunset so even though brass engines tend to be a little bit tricky to fix up if they have issues I think I'll take my chances on this one and we'll just see hopefully I haven't made off with anything too bad it did appear to be in pretty good cosmetic shape but of course there's no way of knowing until we get it out of the box so let's open this thing up and see how I made off all right foreign box and apparently Sunset models tend to be a pretty good manufacturer from what I've heard in the community so let's get this one out of the box and see what kind of condition it's in just look at that let's get this thing out of the packaging wow check it out you know it it's certainly not perfect in a couple places but overall this is a very nice looking locomotive it's actually in slightly better condition than it appeared in the pictures which is not something that's very common yeah overall I can't spot any uh significant damage let's have a look at the tender yeah doesn't seem half bad so why don't we take this thing over to the track we'll test it out again the seller did claim that it had issues but uh hopefully it's nothing too significant and we can turn this into a fantastic running locomotive so hopefully we can get a little bit of a better idea of what the condition of this locomotive is like unfortunately a key problem with a lot of these brass and die cast models is that since the whole body is made out of metal there's a lot of opportunities for short circuits to happen so if the seller is claiming this thing has problems that's probably what I would put my money on anyways let's give this thing some power and see what happens here oh it did move a little bit I'm increasing the voltage and nothing's happening felt like the motor just moved a little bit oh let's give it full Voltage here okay then that sounds like we've spun something in the drive okay so the seller was not kidding this thing definitely does have some issues it's got some sort of an electrical connectivity issue and it's also clearly got a problem with the drive now so let's bring it over to the workbench and see if we can't do something to try to make this better so we'll see what we can do on this locomotive it's too bad I got kind of excited there when I saw it moved a bit I thought you know maybe just the dirt on the wheels was preventing it from going which uh you know this is clearly part of the problem but the fact something has spun in the drive it's not so good as a matter of fact I can actually see where the problem is it's kind of hard to look in there but uh looks like something on the drive shaft has actually split yeah with this light you can kind of see what's going on in there so I have no idea how we're supposed to get down to that but we'll figure it out one thing that I want to be very careful about though is that these trucks are all spring loaded and I can tell you from experience if you remove the screws and those come out they're a nightmare to get back in so hopefully there's a way to kind of Pop the drive out without interfering with that I'm not entirely sure these are the types of things that you sometimes will encounter when working on fancier brass locomotives anyways let's see what we can do here notice that there's a screw here and two on the back so I'm kind of wondering if we remove those if the drive will pop out there's only one way to find out I guess well looks like we're making a little bit of progress now let's see if this front one holds the rest of it in okay that didn't do anything let's try this screw all right that was not so bad um anyways now we have a bit of a better look at what the problem is you can see that this is just a clean cut right off the motor the rest of it's actually still on there so I think this probably just dry rotted we'll see quickly there's no resistance so the drive's not seized up that could have you know caused that motor seems to be turning pretty smooth so I think this is really just the main issue obviously it'd be good to open all this up and lubricate it but this is not that bad well we have this thing apart we'll just check in on the gearbox if we remove these two screws it should allow us to pop this off which I think will allow us to open all that up and just have a look let's throw some fresh oil in there because I'm guessing by the looks of things that this engine has been sitting for an awful long time well overall it's not that bad you know there is a little bit of old grease in there but uh it's even still kind of viscous I'm gonna clean this out just for the sake of it you know because we already have this whole thing apart but honestly this wouldn't harm this locomotive all that much so I went and got all these components all cleaned up I think they came out looking pretty good there's a little more Grime in that gearbox than I originally thought so I'm kind of glad that I cleaned it all out anyways we'll throw some fresh oil and grease and I'm sure that this thing will be mint foreign so with that all reassembled I think it's good to go but I want to kind of clean all these parts up first just because as you can see everything is really dirty I'm guessing that this Locum of how to have been sitting at least 20 years if not more just due to the oxidization on the wheels and all the dust in this thing I don't know I don't think anybody's been running this anytime recently so we'll see what we can do to kind of Tidy it all up a little bit okay so that right there is a bad sign something is clearly jamming up a little bit here and see if we can find the source of that problem this Rod is just a little bit bent that's more like it so I think at this point we can go ahead and try to reinstall the gearbox [Applause] foreign so I think with the drive hopefully I'll sorted out we'll try to focus in on the wheels which obviously are not looking so great to do this I'll hook up a controller to the motor we'll try to get the wheels turning on their own and then we'll uh just try to kind of clean them manually here [Music] that's probably the most glossy those Wheels have looked in like 40 years foreign well I think at this point the only thing left to do is to take this thing over to the track and see if it runs well hopefully our efforts will have paid off with this locomotive I think that it should run but you always never know I mean if I put something backwards on or something like that we might have a short circuit I almost find it a little bit strange that there's no drawbar for the tender I don't see any place to attach one to the locomotive so I think I'm gonna have to Fashion something up there at some point but for now let's just see if this thing will start oh yeah when we had a runner well it's now about five hours later and I think that I've finally got this thing working right despite being a runner it could not handle the 22 radius curves on my layout as you saw so I had to do quite a few modifications to get this thing to work right the first mod was replacing the two front wheels with some slightly smaller ones just so there was a little bit more room for the front truck to Pivot the second modification was removing the center flanges which just allows the wheels to have a little more play on the curves and then the final two modifications being tapping a bolts into the locomotive so I could add this drawbar as well as tapping a screw into the tender that way I could properly connect the wire and make a more reliable electrical connection so this thing's all ready to go now I'll give it some power and show you all how it runs so you can see it navigates through the corners with no problems it just runs like a dream it's super smooth top end speed is fantastic it's pretty good and when it comes around in a second here I'll show you the low speed it's also quite impressive I don't know what kind of gearing they put on this locomotive but just check this out so yeah as you can see this locomotive just runs like a dream so I think that there's only one thing left to do now and that's connects my daylight coaches up to it and run it as an entire train all right well I got this thing all coupled up let's give it some power look at that foreign [Applause] foreign [Music] well folks I think that that's going to be about it for today's video I hope you all enjoyed I'm absolutely thrilled with these results I'm so happy to see it finally running around the layout as well as it does I mean I've been running this thing for 10 minutes straight and it hasn't missed a beat it's just been going around like a top and it's just so great to see you know I did have to put a fair amount of effort into getting it to where it is but there's nothing more satisfying than putting a lot of effort into something and then having really good results like these it's just awesome so yeah I hope you all enjoy it as well and with that I just want to thank you all so much for watching thank you

Channel: SMT Mainline

Views: 113,478

Keywords:

Id: BwVlKHo6H1A

Length: 17min 30sec (1050 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 05 2023