Lionel Classic 390e

Check to see if the brushes have a braided wire tether. I've seen a few of these where the tether hangs up on the side of the brush tube and keeps the brush from making good contact.

Steve

I checked the brushes, they have springs. i cleaned them an put them back, no change, any other thoughts?

Lubricate the motor and run it at medium speed for a short while at the test bench (I do it upside down in a cradle). You will notice the motor will let go after a few minutes and run a lot easier. These motors need to be broken in, and the "new" lube is 25 years old so it could be a little bit hard. Once these motors are broken in, they should run very smoothly. The Lionel Classic era motors are very robust reproductions of the original.

THANKS TO BOTH OF YOU. I have tried to test run it on a bench with a clip lead to the frame and roller and the e unit cycles and sometimes it runs a little and sometimes it will run for a minute or two the stop. this is why i'm thinking it is the e unit. oh and i did oil it first. I hate taking out the eunit but i guess that's the next step.

If you have it running in the forward direction, just lock out the e-unit. This should just bypass the e-unit. Do this with the loco in the upright position as e-units do not like being upside down.

E-Units should NEVER be oiled - use only tuner or electric motor cleaner solvents!

Again thanks to everyone.  I have been running it in the upright position but I can't seem to hold onto it and lock the eunit at the same time. The way it runs intermittently still makes me think it could be a finger. And no I didn't oil the eunit but if I do take it apart I'll certainly clean the drum and make sure all the finger contact the drum properly.

Once I cleaned the drum and stopped the e-unit from shorting to the frame the motor started running pretty good. It is still erratic on switching directions so at least one finger probably isn't making good contact.  Maybe tomorrow night  I'll tackle the e-unit. I haven't even tested the whistle yet, I hope it works.

mine had a bad solder joint to the pick up roller ,might be cracked ?

I finally decided to completely disassemble the motor and resolder every connection in it, that helped some but the real problem was just plain old poor workmanship. When i took the motor apart the stud that holds the black wire and is connected to a buss bar inside was not properly crimped. The buss bar goes from the back of the terminal to the motor field, it fell off in my hand. So this was re stacked and soldered into place. That helped but then i noticed that the other end of the field wire was only wrapped around the core terminal so it was sparking and making intermittent connection. This also got soldered and now the motor seems to be reliably working. The person I bought it from said he never ran it so maybe he didn't know it had all these issues.

Gack. I was going to buy one of those, but then I got a killer deal on an original in amazing condition, which runs flawlessly. Congratulations on doing a great job of diagnosing and fixing some problems that wouldn't have occurred to most of us when looking at a near-mint example of a modern repro. 

They're awesome. I don't have many modern classics, but the 1-390 is gorgeous pulls tons, and runs better than a swiss watch.

This evening after testing the motor one more time on the bench I put the 390 back together and sent it around my layout. It ran flawlessly. I now have it pulling a 6 car freight trains made up mostly of my custom painted cars and it looks and runs great. The next project now will be redoing an old tender shell that I bought on E-Bay so I can make this a B&M steamer with the classic red and silver speedlettering. I have to figure out a way to fill in where the brass Lionel Lines placard was so I can decal over it smoothly, anyone ever done this?