Legacy Conrail SD80MAC bad speaker?

sometimes Lionel boards have their contacts get oxidized. I believe one step is to reseat the boards.

Where's the techs to tell ya?

You can check the speaker with a battery to see if it clicks firmly (when it's disconnected).

As Joe says, just reseating the boards on the motherboard may be all that's needed.

My top suspect is the two PLCC chips on the RS 5.5 board in the locomotive.  Many times for older locomotives I have to use my PLCC extraction tool and reseat these chips to clear the oxidation off the contacts.  This is a very common issue.

Note: DO NOT TRY TO DO THIS WITHOUT THE PROPER TOOL!

In order to reseat the PLCC chips, you MUST use the PLCC extraction tool or you'll likely crack the socket and render the board dead.

Thanks guys, I'll open it up and try reseating boards first. I will probably order one of these extractors as well - should this one work? https://www.amazon.com/a061110...sisted/dp/B007Q8J2HG

ahh there's John!

@Mike0289 posted:

Thanks guys, I'll open it up and try reseating boards first. I will probably order one of these extractors as well - should this one work? https://www.amazon.com/a061110...sisted/dp/B007Q8J2HG

That will work fine, mine is a $5 Radio Shack one that I bought at least ten years ago, still working.

@Mike0289 posted:

Thanks guys, I'll open it up and try reseating boards first. I will probably order one of these extractors as well - should this one work? https://www.amazon.com/a061110...sisted/dp/B007Q8J2HG

Mike,

I have the same issue with my 6-18992  Southern Pacific Alco S-2 #1440 with a crackling noise in the speaker. It's not a 100% all the time noise  but seems it's mostly on startup.

I haven't opened mine up yet, but did reseating solve your speaker problem?

***If anybody else has had this issue, please feel free to chime in.

Robert

Ach, meant to follow up! @R Whitley I opened it up and reseated both the sound boards and it has been totally fine since then. Must have been that oxidation issue a couple folks mentioned.

@Mike0289 posted:

Ach, meant to follow up! @R Whitley I opened it up and reseated both the sound boards and it has been totally fine since then. Must have been that oxidation issue a couple folks mentioned.

That's great news!  I will try the same thing hopefully this week. Thanks for the successful update.

@R Whitley posted:

Mike,

I have the same issue with my 6-18992  Southern Pacific Alco S-2 #1440 with a crackling noise in the speaker. It's not a 100% all the time noise  but seems it's mostly on startup.

I haven't opened mine up yet, but did reseating solve your speaker problem?

***If anybody else has had this issue, please feel free to chime in.

Robert

Maybe this will help someone else that experiences this situation.

I would like to report that the crackling noise in my speaker is gone. Things I tried in this order: (1) I started by removing the speaker and adding a new speaker that I had laying around and the results were the same issue.  (2) I exercised the volume pot, that made no difference. (3) I reseated the sound boards and that fixed the issue. Now I am crackling free!

FYI: start with steps #2 & 3 first.

Thanks to @Mike0289, @gunrunnerjohn, @Engineer-Joe for your input!

Robert