Why 90s Bachmann Locomotives Fail - Can it be Fixed?

well folks in today's video we're gonna be working on this vintage Erie Lackawanna gp15 locomotive from Bachmann this is a locomotive which was gifted to me a couple years ago from another Channel called fish and other stuff he sent this locomotive in and at the time it was in working order unfortunately it had bad gears so it made a bit of a clicking noise as it went around but that's a pretty common problem with these older Bachmann locomotives and anyways by flipping the drive around I was able to reduce the clicking sound so I did a little bit of maintenance on this thing and never really thought anything of it until the other day when I was doing a live stream and I was running this thing around it was running perfectly it was doing good speed the current draw was low and then out of nowhere something went very wrong with this locomotive and it failed quite epically the locomotive slowed down within a matter of seconds and then some smoke started to come out of it so I'm thinking that the Armature actually failed on this engine quite commonly when these locomotive have motor issues It's usually the commutator that fails but given the amount of smoke which came out of this engine I'm thinking that the coils might have gone bad so we're going to open this thing up we're going to see if we can repair it and more than anything I just want to figure out what exactly happened was it the Armature or was it the coils I don't know but we're gonna find out so we'll take the shell off here and you can see it's a pretty simple design you've got two lights which have a lot of hours on them and then just your basic Bachmann pancake motor so we're gonna try to remove this thing the best way to do this would probably be just to remove these two screws you have to be careful when you do this because there are Springs right behind these plates so they might fly out if you're not careful there's one of the springs and that right there is already one of the signs that this motor has overheated because usually when too much current goes through these Springs they deform which is exactly what's happening here this one should be about double the size and I expect the opposite one to be quite the same oh my goodness the other one's even worse well this is starting to make me second-guess myself maybe it was the commentator that failed all right so here it is the Armature itself and what we see right here is that there is quite a bit in the way of deposits on the commutator so it's not impossible that this was the point of failure however these coils are looking mighty crispy in a couple places so I don't know I guess what we could try doing is just cleaning up the commutator and we could put this Armature back inside and hope for the best but I'm still quite suspicious that this is what has failed you know one pretty clear indicator that this Armature might have failed is the fact that most of the wax which Bachmann puts on these coils has burned off the same section that's looking pretty crispy which probably means this thing overheated but uh I'm kind of more inclined just to clean it up throw it back in the locomotive and see what happens and then if it is bad we'll just go from there since these things can be doing like a couple thousand RPM there's a lot of wear and tear here and the little bits of carbon off the brushes once they get caught in the plates on the commutator here that will just start to burn it basically really turns what are supposed to be separate pieces of metal into a giant piece of metal which is a problem so sometimes by just cleaning these little gaps so you can actually get these motors going again but like I said I think in this case it's the coils oh that's looking half decent now why don't we put it back inside here so we go through this locomotive I'm gonna try to clean all the parts as best I can too is because what happens over time is the oil gets kind of tacky and when it does that it puts more strain on the motor which is another reason why this thing might have failed having said that this is certainly not the worst case I've ever seen there's only a little bit of dust in here that I can spot so yeah it's still kind of mysterious all right so I got all the gears and everything looking a lot better I think that maybe this locomotive had a little bit more oil and grease than I had originally thought so it's starting to become a little more clear as to why this motor might have failed so hopefully now that we've got all that stuff out it will work a little bit better again we don't know that this motor is in good shape but at the same time the community also renamed it the Eerie hackawanna because it's a engine which produces smoke so I don't know maybe it's part of its identity now this right here is the bad gear which is why these engines make this sort of clicking noise after a certain amount of time that's where they always fail now we're going to take these Springs here and we're going to try to stretch them back out a little bit this is not ideal these really ideally would be replaced but I don't want to sink any money into this locomotive just yet so I'll just try to do this well I think at this point we can throw the shell back on it take it over to the track and see if that did anything whatsoever to it expectations are not very high considering how that Armature looked but uh let's give it a chance here pretty sure this thing is going to do one of two things either it's gonna start and run for a little while or it's just gonna burn up right here on the spot there's that off chance it will actually run so let's give it some power I saw it move for just a second there what oh boy that looks like we're already uh back to square one like again here foreign so that didn't go all that well it seems like the legend of the Eerie hakawana lives on here and I was kind of expecting something like that to happen but at least this time we know it was in fact the coils and not the commutator so we can go looking for spare parts and see if we can get this locomotive going again it shouldn't be too hard because I am quite confident that I have parts for one of these old pancake drives they're pretty simple that's just the unfortunate truth about uh Motors like this you know you can usually clean the commutator and get them back but when the coils go it's basically the the Genie's been let out of the bottle and uh it's never gonna go back in there so yeah the Magic Smoke is out of the locomotive now we need to find a new motor for it so let's see if we can find ourselves a replacement Armature I feel like there's got to be at least one amongst all these parts [Applause] thank you foreign so we found ourselves a lifelike motor and uh these are basically identical to Bachmann's funny enough even though they were both built maybe in different factories they use practically identical parts so much so that sometimes you can swap them so we'll see this might just have what we're looking for I'm not entirely sure if the Armature in this is even good I can't remember what it ended up in there for but uh in any case we'll see if we can get this open here well that looks like a super healthy Armature but the question is is this the same size gear as the one inside the Bachmann let's find out good to see the spring didn't fail that time yeah this one didn't fare so well it looks very similar don't they well did you fancy that it actually does work so now we just need to try to get this whole thing back together and hopefully with a new Armature this thing will work you know there's the off chance that this is also a bad Armature but I'm feeling a lot better about this one so uh let's see what we can do here tell you what you know you've messed up when you can't test your shady locomotive because your shady controller also has a problem this right here is not an ideal way to test out a motor but what I don't want to do is put this whole thing back together just to discover this is also a bad Armature so we're just going to feed some wires down into the uh down to the brushes here we'll see if that does anything oh that does not seem good foreign well it's working it certainly doesn't sound super healthy but uh I think we should just pack it all up and try it out all right so I managed to find what I think will work as a replacement spring so we'll put that there on the inside and then uh we're just gonna put that spring back and I think it will be all right all right let's go see if that works well certainly not good but it's not pulling too much in terms of amperage it is a little high but hopefully it will just start to kind of pull through here that or it's going to burn out again I don't know foreign ly picking up the pace that's for sure it's not perfect but doing it current draws down yeah now we're really rocking and rolling I'll just let that go around and break in a little bit so those results seemed half decent it certainly was not going as fast as I was hoping for but the current draw was relatively good so that's mostly what's important here one thing that I did notice though and it might explain the low speed problem is that the light was flickering quite a bit and that's actually kind of a good sign in this case because the light obviously picks up power regardless of whatever the motor is doing so if it's flickering there's an electrical issue and I had a look at these wheels and I don't know it's kind of remarkable that the engine was running as well as it does like these are super oxidized so I'm definitely going to clean those down as well as the contacts inside here and hopefully that will get this locomotive running a little bit better I'm starting to think that this locomotive might have been involved in a flood actually just considering how dirty everything is and the fact that it's all kind of caked on I'm thinking this thing had to have been underwater at some point and it's really not an inconceivable thing because a lot of people keep their trains in basements so I've heard tons of stories of these things being involved in floods maybe that happened here I don't know either way we'll try to fix it up you also need to put that clip back look at how dirty the contacts are that's no good it's actually a good thing that we open these up too because these wheels are super dirty which was probably also adding more strain to the drive all right so the wheels are all cleaned up and I'd be willing to bet a couple bucks that they're gonna work a lot better one thing that's important when you're reinstalling these though is that you put the insulated sides on the same side just something a note anyways we'll throw those back in there all right hey that's a good kitty all right so with the wheels all cleaned up and the shell looking probably the best it has in many years I think we should take this thing over to the track and see how it runs I really hope this thing runs half decent now that we've got the wheels all cleaned up I don't see how it would have made it any worse but you never know anyways let's give this thing some power yeah there we go not even a hesitation and certainly not stuttering as much as it was either that is way better look at her go I think we've picked up a little bit of top end speed and you know what we've lost a little bit of the current draw so I think that this thing is now within spec I mean here we are running it at about 18 volts so wide open throttle and uh yeah seems to just be going like a top that's awesome I'll try to test out our low speed it's really not something these types of locomotives are known for but yeah that's not half bad for a locomotive like this I mean it is cogging pretty bad but I really would not expect much better these three-pole motors are just not meant to creep and uh we'll check out reverse and you can see you can hear it's still got that clicking noise but that's just something that happens with these older bachmans but at least in forwards it doesn't seem to be making any sound so why don't we get this thing hooked up to a train I don't think I want to hook it up to my Intermodal cars because I don't want to stress this drive too much but uh yeah I think it could probably pull a few Freight cars all right so we got a little six car consist all hooked up here we'll give it some power and it doesn't seem to be uh struggling whatsoever with that [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] running this thing for almost 10 minutes at nearly wide open throttle and it hasn't had a single problem it's just been going around like a top current draw and everything else is still in check so I think that we can safely call this one a success at this point just goes to show you that all you really need to get an old Bachmann locomotive going again are lifelike Parts anyways I think that that's going to be about it for today's video but I hope you all enjoyed I overall enjoyed the process of repairing this thing a little trickier than I was expecting but you know what the results I think speak for themselves and I'm just happy to say that the Eerie hackawanna lives on anyways with that I'd like to thank you all so much for watching um [Music] gonna check this thing out you can even handle the Mountain layout pretty well and for whatever reason the headlight which I thought was burnt out has started working again check it out [Music] [Music] all right [Music]

Channel: SMT Mainline

Views: 49,932

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Id: odwjmepuTRY

Length: 22min 56sec (1376 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 02 2023