21105 Locomotive appears to be shorting out.

I don't have a lot of experience with postwar Flyer, but here goes:

As far as I can recall, the drivers on most Flyer steam locomotives have whitewalls.  It's the whitewall material that actually insulated the driver tire from the the wheel center.

There may be something bridging the whitewall on the back side of the driver, or the material has shrunk and the driver tire's become loose an occcaionally touches the frame or side rods.

Rusty

I am confused about what you are talking about with the drawbar. I don't know how it could be on the track, since it runs in between the rails. I assumed the power is being transferred through the plug from the tender. I took a couple of pictures of the Locomotive. Can you confirm my thinking that these are the aluminum tire/wheels?

 Here's a shot of draw bar.

The whole engine.

No you do not have the rare aluminum driver version. Those are standard Gilbert S Steam drivers with the white insulating ring between the tire and hub. Just be sure that all of the tires are snug on the hubs and not loose allowing for them to contact the loco chassis.

The drawbar on these loco's is a quick disconnect style. Meaning you can quickly disconnect the tender by removing the plug and lifting the loco off the track. Earlier locos the drawbar was riveted to the lead truck on the tender and attached by screw to the loco chassis. It was harder to disconnect the two from one another without tools, and impossible if the loco was a later hard wired version. My reference was, if you were sitting the loco on the track, and not attaching the drawbar to the lead truck it may have been off the rails and allowing for the frame to touch the track causing a short. Be sure all wheels on all trucks and chassis are on the rails.

Check for clearance of that little tab at the bottom of the reverse unit when it is pulled all the way down. This tab is shown in your next to last photo.

Power is transferred through the plug, but with these later loco's with this drawbar style, the configuration is different. In older steam locos where the drawbar is attached to the lead tender truck, Gilbert used an insulated rivet. This isolated the drawbar from picking up power from that truck. In these later loco's this is not the case. The lead tender truck is a metal frame assembly. Which ever rails power is being picked up by the metal wheels on that front truck, it is going through all of the truck frame, to the rivet attaching it to the tender frame where the one lead for the plug is attached, and out to the tab for the drawbar. If you connect a drawbar to that tab, it will carry the current to the loco chassis.

With that in mind, if the loco chassis is grounded using one of the leads from the plug, if you have the metal wheels on the wrong side of the front tender truck, you'll get a dead short. The solution is to take the front wheel sets from the front truck and install them on the back truck in the same orientation, and take the wheel sets from the rear truck and install them in the same orientation on the front truck. If you look at your second from the last photo, you can see the metal wheels are on the Engineers side. The rear truck metal wheels should be on the firemans side. You want to swap them so the metal wheels on the front truck are on the firemans side and the metal wheels on the rear truck are on the engineers side.

Gandy

Last night when i was taking the picture i noticed that the front driver wheels/axle are very loose in the chassis they ride in. I was wondering if they were arcing on the metal chassis the axle rides in. Are the pressed on wheels supposed to be steel or something? I had tried to test a magnet on them the other night and it didn't stick so i wasn't sure they were aluminum or some other type of non magnetic metal.

Thanks for your help. 

The front truck and trail truck can be a bit sloppy it will not harm anything.

The tires and hubs are cast metal so they probably would not be magnetic. The white wall is a plastic insert used to insulate the hub from the tire and thus insulate each driver. Later wheels were either all plastic or had plastic hubs with metal tires.

If you get to the point where your stuck, you can send the loco and tender to me and I'll do a clean and repair on it for you for a few bucks. I'm in a neighboring state.

Gandy

How did you make out with the 21105 shorting issue?

Posting two images. One of a wiring diagram that has been posted around a few times. The diagram in the lower right corner applies to your loco, be sure your internal wiring is like the diagram.

The second photo is of a genuine 21105 with aluminum drivers that I purchased from Ken Hein.

Gandy