I recently acquired a Lionel FM H16-44 loco with Odyssey speed control. When I first powered it up it ran fine for a couple of laps of my test track but then there was a shower of sparks from the wheels and a scraping sound from inside. Upon removing the body I discovered the flywheel magnet in two pieces. So I removed the two halves of the magnet to see if I could align the two halves and they fit together quite well. I decided that a little CA might hold them on the flywheel. So I figured a way to put a small drop of CA on a tiny jewelers screwdriver tip while holding the two halves of the magnet in place and eventually I managed to get them aligned on the flywheel and a couple of drops of CA to hold them in place. They fit so well I can hardly find the cracks between the two pieces. A while later I placed the loco back on the track and Though there were no sparks it had no speed control it was stopped or running at full speed. My question now is whether the field of the broke magnet having stray eddies is causing the lack of speed control or if the Odyssey motor driver board is at fault. A possible clue would be if anyone has had success gluing these pieces of the magnet back on the flywheel I could pull the motor driver board from another Odyssey loco however that would take me hours to make the swap and the donor would be down till I had a replacement motor driver. However there is another point about this failure that bothers me. The flywheel has a protruding ridge at the top and the magnet is mounted before the flywheel is installed on the motor shaft. This presents two problems first ceramic magnets are brittle and unless the brass flywheel expands at the same rate as the magnets when heated they are doomed to fail due to hoop stress. Once this happens the flywheel must be removed or a new motor/flywheel is called for. If the ridge on the flywheel were on the bottom the magnet could have been held on with something like a silicone adhesive and expansion of the flywheel would not have cracked a slightly looser fitting magnet. And were it to fail a new magnet could be installed by most people on this forum without removing the flywheel. Lionel are you listening, from the late eighties till around 2018-19 I purchased a new high end loco from Lionel every year. Not since, I figured out the game of finite repair parts and poor Chinese engineering. If someone has a spare Odyssey motor driver board I might be in the market. j
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