362 BARREL LOADER, REMAKE

Another one of those classic finicky Lionel accessories. Can be a real pain but once you get them right they are great fun.

My secret is I put wood screws through the four mounting holes and do a couple of turns into my layout base. Then I back off the turns on each screw, as needed, until I find the sweet spot of operations for moving the barrels. Trial and error but it yields good results. My 362 has worked flawlessly for years now.

Oh, and is well known for these operate with a separate variable power source and fine tune the voltage to get things humming along just right.

One part engineering, two parts smoke and mirrors, but if you hold your jaw just right, they will work!

I could be wrong, but do the remakes have a rectifier?

Chuck Sartor posted:

I could be wrong, but do the remakes have a rectifier?

I don't believe so.  Rectifiers convert AC to DC current.  If they did have a rectifier the coil would not vibrate.  

The original versions have rectifier discs. Add one inline and I'll bet that will help.

Just for a clarification, I have the choice of running my layout on either AC or DC current. I did this for some of the smaller steamers and industrial switchers, where I'd rather have more weight in the locomotive versus the circuit board reverse.

I've read where certain coil driven operating cars don't work well on DC current.  The coil driven revolving searchlight car certainly doesn't work well on DC current by my experience.

On the other hand, by my experience, the postwar/MPC era manufactured operating barrel ramp cars work just fine on DC current... no alterations in the components.

I don't think there's too much difference between the operating accessory ramp and the car itself. I would assume since the car works on DC current, the accessory would also.

Now I have also found that different production periods of the Lionel wood barrels do "cooperate" better than others. It must be different types of wood? I've also found that the wooden spools that look like sewing thread spools, sold in small bags at craft stores, "cooperate" really well. I've painted these spools either brown or grey, just to give them a little more visual character.

As another aside, I have an elevated track on my layout, AC powered, where I park self-contained operating cars, including a MPC era 9307 chase gondola - same components as the postwar version. It works super on the AC current. I just moved it to my regular track: It performs very slowly on DC current with low voltage to the track. If I increase the voltage, the chase action pretty much stops.

Chuck Sartor posted:

The original versions have rectifier discs. Add one inline and I'll bet that will help.

I just saw this as I posted my reply above. I'm not a bona fide electrical expert, but I suppose that might explain why the barrel car works fine on DC current, whereas the revolving searchlight and chase gondola do not.

I believe the purpose of the rectifier disks in Lionel accessories was to block half the wave form giving a series of single polarity pulses operating the vibrating coils more strongly.

BiranelO27

Is your DC full wave rectified AC (as opposed to filtered DC)? If so it would consist of a series of "pulses" just of the same polarity unlike AC and should operate some of the Lionel accessories.

Scotie posted:

Is your DC full wave rectified AC (as opposed to filtered DC)? If so it would consist of a series of "pulses" just of the same polarity unlike AC and should operate some of the Lionel accessories.

Ah, learn something every day. Yes sir, that's what I am doing.

Originally, I used DC power packs, but they didn't have enough amperage. So then I read about the conversion switch Lionel had at one time made for operating their G scale stuff with a normal transformer. So that's what I did. Then I made one of my own, a little larger than the Lionel one, with a heat sink and air vents in it.

So I stand informed.  DC current is steady, so how does it make the coil vibrate ?

AC switches polarity at 60 Hz. If you just use a full wave rectifier you eliminate the polarity changes but it still will show the pulses. Adding filters as in done on typical DC power supplies smooths that ripple into a constant voltage level.

You don't want to use a full wave rectifier, just a single diode. 6 amps is more than enough. The purpose is to cut the 60 cycle hertz to 30. This gives the coil time to pull and return the heavy ramp to 'center' before a another cycle.  Which results in a slower, heavier vibration. The car doesn't need the diode as it's ramp is lighter in weight. Apparently when Lionel re-issued the ramp, they forgot about that.