Over a month ago my WP TMCC Challenger front drive truck stopped running and then last week the dummy A unit on my legacy SP Sharks stopped smoking with the dreaded 3 blinks of the cab light. I was waiting on looking at the Challenger and several forum members were a great help in guiding me on what to do and where to look. Almost 2 weeks ago I picked up a large nice foam cradle repair station from another TTOS club member at our meet. Since my FRA Administrator (my loving wife) is working the next 2 days I thought this might be a good time to take a look and test my skills, which are okay, at repairs. Today also was a good day since I work many hours and I was finally able to get enough rest being on vacation this week and catching up with club duties that I made some time to work on them.
First to the bench was the Challenger. I center roller was working so it was not that and I had tested for that issue earlier so time to take off the shell. Easy enough once I had studied the right way to do it and have the right tools. Upon shell removal those little metal harness clips came off the inside of the shell which I addressed later. A short inspection revealed one front truck motor wire was broken off at the solder joint at the motor. I fired up my Weller soldering station along with i had recently replaced the soldering iron tip. I went to strip the wire which seemed to short but then I found there was plenty of wire it was just zip tied to tightly into the harness creating a stress point. After a careful strip and solder the job was done....almost too easy!
Now I get brave and decided that since this smoke unit is one of those that can be modified to work much better as per Mike's video I decided to open it up and look. I have never seen such nasty batting/wick material. I bought this engine new (it sat as old stock for several years) and frankly was shocked. The batting material looks like a cross between fiberglass boat cloth repair and canvas. How did this even hold smoke fluid? Naturally the fiberglass sock around the heat element was charred. I cut off the resistor sock, replaced the wick material with the good stuff, also drilled out the fan intake hole on the circuit board as per Mike's video. What a difference! Now my Challenger is back to running great and smoking even better than ever.
Since I was enjoying success I decided to tackle the SP Legacy Shark dummy unit. I found one fan motor that I had left and went to replace it. I think this unit suffered from a bad build since I could see fan scrapes on the inside top of the smoke circuit board. I tried some adjustment and the tiny oil drop trick but the motor was just shot. My only complaint on this one is the smoke fan motor leads are soldered to the circuit board so it makes it a little tougher to remove and replace the motor. I actually did it first time and got good solder joints. I am improving my soldering skills and while I did not think so I proved myself wrong.
So now is all somewhat happy on my railroad......for now.
Your on a roll! Gotta feel great right about now. Super job!!
