Getting A Locomotive That Hasn't Run in 50 Years Running Again

well folks in today's video we're going to be working on this 462 taiko manual baltimore and ohio steam locomotive this was sent in a few days ago from a gentleman by the name of adam this belonged to his grandfather and it apparently has not run in 50 years which means this thing has probably not been run since around the late 1960s which is pretty incredible it seems like a long time but honestly looking at the contacts and stuff it's very possible that it has not been run for a very very long amount of time when locomotives sit for a while a lot can change contacts and things like that like any metal can oxidize over time the other thing is lubricants and things like that can dry and seize so we tested this thing it didn't start but taiko manoa engines are really really tough and honestly a lot of these things you just open them up clean them get the dried lubricants and stuff out clean all the contacts well they'll usually just fire right back up again so i'm pretty confident we'll be able to get this thing working again i mean there's no guarantee with anything but uh yeah we'll give it a shot and maybe we'll get this thing riding the rails once again for the first time in 50 years wouldn't that be awesome anyway i'm going to take this thing over to the track so i can show of you exactly what the condition of this thing is and then we'll get working on it because i want to show of you all the places to work maybe because uh maybe you have a steam locomotive or any ho scale locomotive that hasn't run in a long time and you can actually apply a lot of the same uh rules to uh getting it running as i'm gonna try to apply to this one today so let's get started now i'm going to be very surprised if this thing does anything different from the last time but i just want to set it up to show all of you exactly what's going on with this thing uh just so we can get an idea of what we need to work on so we'll get all the wheels on just as is and we'll give it some power and see if it responds at all last time we didn't get any current draw which means the motor and light and everything isn't picking up any power and uh as we wiggle it on the track we're still not seeing any current draw over on that meter right there well actually there's a tiny bit but that might just be uh the needle shaking from me trying to wiggle this thing around so i i think this thing is just not picking up its power these uh wheels are super oxidized i don't entirely and trust that electrical system there kind of looks not so great and same goes for the front wheel so we're gonna check all those places but there are a whole bunch of other spots which could be uh troubled points so we're going to also investigate those and hopefully we'll get this thing uh running once again that would be uh pretty awesome i think so let's bring this thing back over to the workbench and get working on it so the very first thing we're gonna do with this locomotive is we're gonna strip it down to the motor and see if we can make the motor turn by just manually turning it with our hands and if that works we'll go from there because that will uh tell us a lot about the condition of this locomotive so we're going to remove the screw which is located in the smoke stack this is very common on tons of steam locomotives especially older you know models that are mostly die-cast and stuff you can find this quite often and on this particular model we got a screw here and a screw here so we're going to undo both of those and then the rest of the chassis should just drop out and we'll be able to have a look at that motor and we'll learn a lot i'd suspect that the commutator which is the thing which gives power to each of the coils it's likely oxidized which is probably why this thing is mostly not starting but we'll be able to test the motor and also find out if the gearbox and everything like that is seized i don't think it is going to be on this model but you never know so anyway let's flip this up here and uh there's our motor and uh well as i suspected it's definitely not seized but we are going to have a look at this piece right here which is the commutator it's located behind this brush and on a lot of these older locomotives you get these motors i believe they're called pitman motors and these are actually usually not that difficult to work on and what i always do when i encounter one of these you remove that spring and sometimes you have to wiggle these out in this case this one just fell out and we can have a look at that and this doesn't look too bad but that very well could be oxidation on the motor so we're going to take this tool right here this is a fiberglass pencil and we're just going to polish up the metal and it will scrape off any oxidization dirt debris this one seems to be really clean actually but sometimes you open these things up and they can be kind of nasty so we're going to do this sometimes with these older motors if they've been sitting for a while and you start them back up sometimes they'll actually remove the oxidization themselves because if you can get them spinning with power the brushes the friction of the brushes will scrape off the oxidization so they almost auto clean in a sense the only thing you really have to watch for on older models especially ones that have a lot of miles on them are the little spaces in between the metal plates on the commutator because these can fill up with carbon from the brushes and all sorts of other little bits of stuff and if these get dirty these can prevent your motor from turning over and they can even burn it out because they'll cause shorts so always check these because i've seen it almost every old model i've worked on has this problem some of them it's not that bad some of them it doesn't really prevent them from running but others it does and i've actually found that kind of ozone smell that a lot of older model models have uh it seems to come from here i've noticed after i clean this i don't find there's as much of a smell so that's another thing to note so yeah with that all cleaned out we will now uh connect some leads to this motor and uh we'll see if it springs to life and then if it does we'll go from there we might have some electrical problems but for the most part things are not looking too bad for this model i've seen much worse in the past if you want you can also clean the brushes it's not a bad thing to do but these don't look oily or anything like that so i don't think it's going to be a problem if we just put them back in so we're going to put this one back in here and we'll pull that spring back around it and just get it positioned all nicely and you want to make sure the other one the spring is pushing it in properly because that can be a big problem you need a decent pressure on the brushes for it to work properly and then i've got some leads from a controller here and something that i always do before i test something is i do a little spark test and if you see spark you know that there is power in each of these leads because you know i sometimes forget to like plug in my controller or turn the power on or something and you know you can think whatever you're working on isn't working because of that but if you do this at least you know that what you're giving power is actually getting power because i can't tell you how many times i've made that mistake so it's just a little something i do because even these wires can sometimes become disconnected from the controller if you're moving it around a lot so it's just a good thing to do now if we give this thing some power we'll put one wire directly on there and it doesn't seem to want to start but it could just be yeah just a little oxidized and just let it turn over and uh well it's running so that's a good start we're gonna stop it there though because uh you can hear some kind of funny noises none of this is really lubricated at this point so we're gonna lubricate all that and then we'll let it run a little more and then we're gonna go looking for electrical problems potentially with the wiring and we'll clean up the wheels and everything like that and uh yeah then hopefully this thing will uh work nicely so we're going to lubricate all the bearings in this thing we're going to put a little bit on this back one here you don't need a crazy amount for bearings we're going to put a bit on this front one i usually get it from the outside just because you don't want to put any close to the commutator because if it gets on there it will burn which is really something you want to avoid it's really bad for the commutator and as for the motor that's pretty much all you need to do um we use really light oil i usually use something like label 102 or something like that it's not necessarily the best oil out there i haven't played around with a crazy amount of them so there may be a better one but just use kind of like a light oil and you should be in business and we're going to lubricate this but we're going to use some grease and oil it's just better because there's a lot more friction here than there is with the other parts and then on a steam locomotive you want to just put a tiny bit of oil i put a little too much on that one but just little drops on each of the screws and this is where steam locomotives are a bit more particular than diesels you just need to put a little bit on each of these points right here little pieces that go actually inside the model anything that moves really you want to have some oil on there because oil breaks friction up and uh it just helps things last longer and operate smoother so make sure everything is lubricated so as for the outside of the model that's pretty much good as we come down here there are a lot more spots which you can lubricate you can put a bit of oil here here i can put some right here you don't need a crazy amount just a little bit will do because it will spread around evenly and you don't want these things to be swimming in oil so we're still not great for them but also if you put too much oil it's going to end up on your track it's not something you want now on these uh tycho mantle models the steamers most of them have a few screws on the bottom you can find this on other models as well actually those have like a little plate and this actually holds all the wheel bearings for everything in and you always want to check these because they can get dirty and also they need to be lubricated so just take off the plate and have a have a quick peek it's not something that takes a crazy amount of time but it's a really important part to these models and like i said it's not even just tycho man whether it uses these i can't think of another manufacturer off the top of my head that goes about it this way but this is pretty common on older models from the 50s and 60s and uh yeah we should be able just to you know lift that plate off try to keep the wheels in place because if they pop out you don't want to lose any of the bits for the valve year these bearings are really clean sometimes these are really old and greasy in which case you'd want to lift these out one at a time and just kind of clean them out but you can see these are all pretty shiny so all we're going to do is lubricate them you can buy lubricants oils what i would highly recommend is whatever you do buy make sure that it is conductive lubricant so like there's a brand i use called conductive lube or something like that and not only will it lubricate but it will actually improve how well um each bearing picks up power so you'll improve the performance of your steam engine which is just terrific so yeah now we can put this all back together i don't know if this is the case for all take on manual models it would appear that this one uh actually uses one of the screws for the plate to hold in the motor so i've accidentally disconnected the motor doing that but if we line it up right and just screw it down we should be okay i've never i don't know if i've ever opened up this specific type of steam locomotive before i have one really similar to it but uh yeah i wasn't aware that it did that learn something new every time i open up one of these things but in any case we'll put the rest of the screws back in and we should be in business so i've now got some label 106 and labelle 102 mixed up it's a ratio of i think like one to four so there's one part grease four parts oil um you want to change those ratios up depending on the age the locomotive like the condition of the parts but also the type of parts because if you're working with parts like these i believe these are made out of nylon there's not a whole lot of friction in these parts you know plastic parts and things like that there's just not as much as there is with metal parts so when there is more friction on older parts especially older metal parts you want to use more grease because the thicker the viscosity the better protection it's gonna make uh between the parts because essentially the lubricant gets in between these two parts it's allowing them to barely touch each other and it gets between them and lubricates them which is why it turns better also why the parts last a lot longer so the thicker the lubricant the less friction there is but the thicker the lubricant is harder to move around so for parts that don't need thicker lubricant use a lower or higher viscosity always mix them up but in either case it should be more liquid if you're using parts that don't have a lot of friction less liquid if you're using parts that do have a lot of friction so i hope that's easy easy to follow didn't do a great job at explaining it but something along those lines um yeah anyway we're just gonna put the rest of this grease on there and uh we should be good from that standpoint and then all we need to do is maybe let this thing run a little bit with some leads connected to the motor and uh yeah then we'll clean a whole bunch of contacts off and put this whole thing back together so at this point i think we can put the model together i've pretty much got the whole thing turning over really nicely so that's good so we're going to put it all back together then we're going to clean up all the contacts and what have you on the inside just because they're definitely quite oxidized so we're going to work on all that we're also just going to check all of our electrical connections to make sure that everything is functioning as it should be because uh you know if it's not it's not going to perform properly so anyway we're just going to make sure this all goes back together as it should and i've got this off just by a little bit so we're just going to slide the whole thing forward and it should all be seated correctly i think the first screw i'll put in yeah put the two back ones in because i think i dropped the uh one that goes in the smoke stack somewhere on the floor actually no it's right here never mind well we'll put these ones in first though it doesn't make a huge difference uh so yeah we'll tighten this one down i'll put the other one in if ever you're putting uh screws in by the way and uh one goes right in but the other is off by a little bit like you're trying to screw two things together just leave one screw kind of loose and then put the other one in and then tighten them both down because that will ensure that they're even because that's another problem i don't think it's a issue with this particular model but i have seen that happen with some stuff where it's just off by a little bit but if you loosen the screws it leaves you enough room to adjust and then you can put the screws in right so you can put them in like that and then once you have them in you can torque them down a little bit more i mean obviously you don't want to strip them or anything but yeah you want them to be you know tight enough they're not going to find their way out of there there we go so those are decently torqued down and we're just going to pop that back in there we do have a front piece to this cab this looks kind of broken might have been meant to go somewhere out here i don't know optimally you would put this piece in before you reassembled that in fact you might have to with this model i can't really tell though yeah i need to need to loosen this up to get that part in because that's supposed to be behind those two pieces of metal hi bad so we've now got the whole model back together and uh we're going to test the electrical connections because frankly i don't entirely trust them so we're going to put the locomotive in this foam cradle here put it upside down and we're going to put some test leads in certain spots and see if the engine will run and uh like i did before a little spark test now on these taiko manuals you've got two grounds you've got one on the locomotive one on the tender they're wired together correctly it should fire up if you put one right here on like a screw you want to pick something kind of exposed because other things may have like paints and stuff which will prevent the power flowing through them yeah they're right on the chassis of the tender and what we're seeing is nothing's springing to life if we tap right in there it seems like we might be getting a bit of something there but if we put it directly on this piece of metal here which is the wire you can see it's springing the life so it seems like the tender is not doing a perfect job at picking up power but these wheels are super oxidized so we're going to clean them off see if that makes a difference i also want to tighten up the screw in fact i want to i want to take this off and clean it because that looks not so great so i've got those wheels looking pretty shiny i got the back ones all cleaned up too and i got them all oiled so uh that should be good got that all cleaned up so there's only one thing left to do which is to take this thing over to the track and test it i'm gonna be honest with all of you most of the time when i fix these things i'm really not so sure if they're gonna start but i feel a lot more confident about this one than a lot of previous ones just because for the most part all the parts seem to be in pretty good condition so provided i've done everything right this thing should start up hopefully it will run okay but in any case let's give it some power and see what she does yeah all right we've got our runner very nice okay well that's uh pretty good it's a very fast model look at how fast it's going that's at about 70 oh 65 percent roughly and it's uh it's booking it uh yeah let's see how fast can this thing go wow um yeah for an engine of its age with a five pole that's pretty fast i'm going to slow it down because that's kind of risky but uh yeah that's not too bad and uh does it reverse okay yeah reverse seems fine no problems there let's try the low speed seized out a little there see on a straight if we can get it doing a low speed and here the motor ribbon and struggling with the low speed a little it's like it's trying i don't know some of these electrical connections might still not be perfect well it's not bad but definitely could use some improvement but uh heck overall we turned an engine which apparently hasn't run for 50 years into a runner once again so i guess that's something to be happy about and uh overall i think it's running pretty good it's not too loud and it's pretty darn fast probably the fastest uh taiko man with steam engine i've ever seen so uh that's pretty nice but anyways before i finish off the video i'd just like to thank adam for sending this locomotive once again it's very generous and i'm glad we could get it working again and with that i'd like to thank you all so much for watching you

Channel: SMT Mainline

Views: 263,799

Keywords:

Id: 12bG1rMUr5E

Length: 20min 50sec (1250 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 05 2021