Worst PRR T1 4-4-4-4 Bowser Steam Locomotive - Can We Make It Run?

well folks in today's video we're going to be working on a vintage bowser t1 locomotive i picked up on ebay a couple months ago i found this locomotive for around 85 dollars and as you can see it's in pretty rough condition when i first bought it i did test it out and it does seem to be running to some extent but it's in pretty rough shape you can see there's a lot to be desired about it so we're gonna try to take this thing apart today try to fix everything up a little bit and hopefully by the end of this we'll have a nice working locomotive i'm not going to work on any of the cosmetics today it does need a lot but i just don't have the decals or anything else so that will probably be something for a video in the future but for now let's see if we can get this thing riding the rails once again but before we start doing any work on this locomotive i just want to show you all what it's currently doing so we'll set it up on the track here and we'll put 12 volts of power in and then i'll just connect this wire which should go to the tender up and uh you can see the engine does run the motors seem to have quite a bit of health in them so that's a very promising sign for this thing it just overall just needs some repairs and the tender itself is kind of messed up too so we'll bring it back over to the workbench and begin working on it now unlike most of the projects i usually work with on this channel we've actually got some very useful information for this one because included in the box is the original exploded parts diagram and we can see here that the front truck is not holding on so i believe it has something to do with this screw in this area so we'll be able to reference that and as for disassembling the rest of the drive just to lubricate it and everything else so we can reference this at any point so this is a very helpful piece of information so anyways i think we can start off just before we do i was at canadian tire a couple days ago and i found this screwdriver and i think it's going to be very helpful because it looks to have some nice precision bits on it made in canada i don't know it was seven dollars i decided to pick it up so we'll be trying that out i'm not sponsored or anything like that from them but uh yeah i like to try out new products and if it's good it's good if it's junk it's junk whatever so it appears to be a flat heads there i think that this screw might have been over torqued at some point yeah it seems to be completely stripped that's no good oh wait a minute well there's the part we need so the question is why is it not holding on there i guess to figure out how this was held in we'll unscrew the other one see exactly how they've got that hooked up hopefully this one isn't stripped as well there we go so with the whole drive out we can see that this longer screw right here appears to have a piece of metal which i think we're missing and i think it's supposed to kind of clip in like that but i don't know it kind of feels like this piece of metal might be stripped as well whoever had this engine before me must have been way over torquing all the screws so i guess we'll try to find something maybe to replace this little part right here and then just get it back in there and if it's good then we'll start to work on the different parts of the drive i also noticed earlier too it looks like somebody tried to wire up a couple lights but the wires don't really seem to go anywhere we've got this bare wire here we've got some wire here i don't know if there's actually supposed to be a light here there's obviously supposed to be one there and it looks like they did wire one in but um i don't know if there's a lot to be desired there as well but for now i think we'll just focus on the drive i went looking through my spare parts and i found this thing i think it might be a little bit larger than the original that was here but we'll try to install it anyway and just see if it works i'm not going to be overly picky with this i really just want to get the engine running again so we'll connect that up there and we'll just try installing it here again hoping that that screw has not been stripped out and does not seem to want to bite so the screw does seem to hold on to some extent but it needs to go a little bit further than it did originally so i think what i'm going to do in this case is we'll install this part right here and i'll just throw this bushing off in athern over that and it should make a similar effect seems pretty secure i suppose the first thing i want to service is the brushes right here i'm not really sure how to remove these this is a little bit of a different design that i'm used to but i guess we'll just kind of wing it oh man i was afraid i would end up doing something like that well it's now about an hour later and by some miracle i did manage to find the two spear pieces of plastic but unfortunately that spring is long gone i looked everywhere for it i even reviewed the footage to see if i could figure out like which direction it fired off to and it happened so quickly that the camera didn't even pick up on it it must have happened within one thirtieth of a second so there was a lot of tension there and i don't think i'm gonna ever find it again but you know what they say when life gives you lemons check out the junk drawer to see if you can find any spare parts kind of looks a bit too big but it might just be the right size the coils have more separation though so even though this is a bigger spring the amount of tension might be right now that actually seems pretty good so i guess we'll just have to try that out and hope for the best but at least we've now got in here we'll clean all this up and i've learned my lesson the hard way for opening up the second one so we'll just go with the commutator with a fiberglass pencil this should do a fine job of just polishing up that metal it's not the greatest i've ever seen but also not the worst it's going to look a heck of a lot better once we get that all polished up we're now going to clean out the gaps on the commutator usually i just use a plastic pick but today i'm going to show you what you can do if you don't have one on hand just get yourself an exacto and you just shave down the end just to make it a little bit more thin just this one nice and sharp like that and this will do a perfect job at getting all that carbon out of there and this is a very important step it will make the motor run way more efficient i've had some engines which won't even run because there's so much carbon buildup here so always do this just make sure whatever it is you're using to clean this part out is softer than the metal because the last thing you want to do is scratch the commutator this is where things are going to get kind of interesting because i have to reassemble this part right here with the new spring which may or may not work i found the parts for a second time it didn't take me an hour luckily um but i'm really testing my luck searching for these so i'm gonna have to be a little more careful this time getting it in there i think what i'm gonna do is uh insert the other brush at first and then just try to kind of squeeze it between both of them i really don't know if this is going to fit just because of this piece of metal here in fact i'm going to remove it just to be careful well that seems to be working fine so i guess we can now service the rest of the drive so you can see right here there are about three or four different screws we have to remove on this part right here i'm just going to open this up just to be sure that you know there's nothing that needs to be checked in on probably throw some fresh oil in there i mean why not here's what i think so far of this it it seems to be really good at getting stuck screws out because you got a little bit more grip you know you put a little more torque on it but i i'm not a big fan so far the size of the handle you know this is actually a lot more comfortable so i'm just going to quickly clean these out these are really not that bad i mean you can see there's a bit of grime in there but sometimes you know you open these things up and they're like really nasty just going to be careful not to accidentally pull the drivers out like the pistons so there's something to keep an eye on yeah there's a little more dirt in there than meets the eye so i'm really glad we're cleaning these out that all seems to be turning quite nicely so i think we can now turn our attention to the second truck okay then now this is the bit where i'll probably lose the spring but uh as i've learned from experience now that's not an option so the solution for this is just going to be to not screw it up nice seems that this thing for the drivers is uh held in by a screw over here and that's unfortunately threaded through this piece of metal right here so i'm gonna have to be super careful not to pull this out otherwise all these parts will come out and they're gonna be a nightmare to get back in so that's just something to keep in mind the bearings for whatever reason seem to be a lot cleaner on this truck and i'm kind of wondering if maybe that means that there wasn't really much oil in here to begin with which kind of supports the idea because this uh this one's pretty stripped out like just look at the teeth on that gear so hopefully by adding a bit of oil we can get some good life out of that gear because right now it's it's so stripped down i really don't know how much longer it's going to last the good news about these kits is you can definitely still find parts for them but it might be expensive so i think at this point the drive is just about ready to go back inside the locomotive but before we do any of that i just want to check in on the whole lighting situation right here because as i mentioned earlier it does leave some bit to be desired so i really can't understand what they were trying to do with this here oh we've got a working light so that one's for the headlight that one's for that lower light so both those wires just need to be connected together and then we need to run them up somehow to this yellow wire right here so all right so i decided to redo all the lighting as you can see just because the original lighting stuff that was in there just didn't seem that great so we got that all rewired i'm going to connect this to that part right there but before we do that i just want to reconnect the two drives right here i've already put out a little bit of crazy glue on this little piece of plastic here and we're just going to put a little bit on the engine of this drive shaft here and i find usually when you have a loose or slipping drive shaft a little bit of ca can go a long way i've done this on locomotives you know like five years ago and it still seems to be holding you just need to be really careful when you're working your gears like this that you don't put too much or put it in the wrong spot otherwise that's obviously going to cause a lot of issues so yeah we'll let that set we'll make sure to the motors are offset you can see they're in different positions and i think what this might do is that you know these motors kind of like slower speeds kind of turn in little movements like that so if they're opposite to each other they'll make more of a continuous turn i think it's all a theory on my part but anyways we'll let that sit connect this up and then hopefully this thing will run all right well we've now got the locomotive complete at least as far as i know but before we take this thing over to the track i want to give some attention to the tender as well to see if we can get this thing operational it would just be nice to have them both working so we need to find a spot to hook up this ground wire we need to make sure that the trucks are picking up power and judging by the wheels they probably aren't and uh i don't know this looks a little bogus too so we'll try to sort all that out first the first thing i'm going to tackle is just polishing up these wheels because frankly they look uh so oxidized i don't really think power can flow through there so i'll just do this a little bit and you can already see just how well they're shining up so i'll do that to every wheel and that should improve everything already quite a bit well those are all looking a little bit better in my opinion now what i want to figure out is why this is so loose and uh actually try to connect it to the locomotive somehow looks like there was a part on here at some point but it doesn't look so great i might just improve it yeah that seems half decent i guess that this uh that this drawbar is probably meant to connect to something there when i first bought the locomotive it came with this thing which i think is supposed to act as some sort of a hitch for this and all the different adjustments go in here but in any case it doesn't seem to line up there so i'm gonna have to figure out something now i have this screw and i tried to thread it through there it does fit it kind of tapped itself a little bit so that's perfect but the screw does not fit through this right here so i think i'm gonna have to widen this and maybe remove this part so i drilled that out a bunch and you can see that this fits through fine so i guess we'll try to hook this up and then we'll see if we can actually get the tender to the right level so it can attach to this that seems fine the whole the whole thing is certainly not perfect i can tell you that for certain but can we use it that's the question so i adjusted this a little bit it really does look like a mini hitch i don't know i think that that's kind of cool so we're going to be hooking up this trailer right here if uh if it will work right let's just see if my adjustments actually did anything no i need to adjust that more that seems pretty good i can even use the closest one i think that that actually looks kind of good so now all i really want to do is try to hook this ground up to the tender and i see one pretty good option for that which is this screw on the on the right all right let's uh let's take this thing over to the track and see what it does all right well we've got her all set up on the track here i decided to do that part off camera just because uh trying to set this locomotive up plus it's tender which are now connected at the same time is kind of tricky while holding a camera i really hope that this thing runs i mean after all the effort went through and considering it did run before i think it's got a good chance but at the same time we also wired in some new lights and uh it changed a lot of things at it on a tender so i'd say there's a very strong possibility there's going to be a short circuit or something anyways let's give this thing some power oh oh all right that's promising let's see will she oh okay seems to be doing it and it's shorted i think there's something around the tender that's shorting so i've been looking over uh this for a while now and i'm pretty sure i've figured out what the problem is i'm sort of surprised i didn't notice this earlier but we've got a tender which is negatively charged the locomotive is positively charged and in between them there's this metal connector and there was originally insulator there which was broken and we removed that so i'm pretty sure this is where the source of the short circuits are i mean to begin with even with an insulator this just doesn't seem like that great of a way to connect them but yeah i don't know metal part like this and it's wrapped in tape it just looks kind of kind of messy so i found this and i think we're going to try to use that no idea if it's actually going to work or not but uh i will try it out and hopefully this will prevent the short circuits i really hope the shorts are with the uh tender not the locomotive all right well we've got her set up on the track now for a second time with that new plastic part let's see if things go any different well it seems to be going through the curve without any short circuit so far let's see if it will make an entire lap doesn't seem half bad this uh s-curve up here is going to be the real question sounds like something might be derailed yeah i think the rear truck's off that railed itself nice okay well folks i think we've got our runner and uh i've got to say it's fantastic to see this thing working as both a locomotive and tender whereas before we just said the engine kind of going around so that is fantastic why don't we see if it will pull some cars now all right so we'll see if we can handle this little seven car consist no problems the coupler height looked pretty good on the tender but we'll have to see about that and just look at her go absolutely fantastic yeah let's see what kind of low speed this thing can do not too bad not too bad that's about where it kicks out but quite impressive for what it is anyways that's probably going to be about it for today's video i've got to say i'm absolutely thrilled with this thing you know an 85 uh t1 locomotive these things usually don't go cheap and i mean it leaves a bit to be desired there's definitely still some problems with the electrical system you can see the lights flickering a bit and it's not running perfectly but overall this is a functional locomotive now and with some cosmetic work i think it could be quite a looker in the future too but until then i'd like to thank you all so much for watching you

Channel: SMT Mainline

Views: 151,170

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Id: S2YCv-Lj73U

Length: 24min 19sec (1459 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 16 2022