I'm looking at some intermodal cranes on Evilbay. I've heard good and bad about them from an operator's point of view. Would anyone have any input or stories about them ?
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They have their warts. I had to do some mods to mine. This was posted in a thread a few years ago, these are the mods I did to mine.
I ended up taking a total of 1/4" off each of the horizontal bottom clamp ends. That should be easy to do, as long as you measure right. I started out with 3/16", but realized that I could take off more and it would make the whole rig work better.
Next, I noticed another issue. When you clamp the Lionel trailers, they're a bit wider than the MTH trailers, and it was very difficult to get exactly aligned so that the clamps would lock. They tended to drop the trailers at times because the clamps would open.
To fix that, I took a bit less than 1/16" off the sides of the clamps tapered off about 1" up to nothing. The 1/16" is the maximum amount removed, that's right at the bottom of the vertical member where it joins the clamp bottom. I may take a bit more off there, but I'm going to tinker with it for awhile. It's still pretty close, but it works 100% better now with the mods. I suspect another 32nd off the sides would be a good idea.
Finally, I made an electrical mod. It turns out that the motors are very unbalanced as far as the power allowed for each function. The lateral travel was pretty sluggish, even after greasing the gears, rails, and rollers. If I turned up the power to make that work well, the up/down and the wheel drive was too fast.
I added a 27 ohm resistor across the 20 ohm existing one for the lateral drive, this gave it more drive and allowed me to match the speed better.
One final mod I'm thinking on. The wheel drive is still too fast for all the other functions, this thing isn't a race car! I'm thinking of increasing the resistors for the two wheel motors to slow them down a bit so it's easier to nudge the crane into position over the tracks.
I ended up buying 2 in trying to finding one good working one since the shaft with the 2 gears tends to have the gears split and fail. The failures appear to happen over time versus too heavy a load but a heavy load can do it too. Finding a replacement gear can be expensive and difficult to find. Replacing it is a bear.
Operationally they are okay but the levers that grab the container can be cantankerous at times. That is half the fun is to master the operation.
I hope this helps.
My #12741, purchased new has been great for kids of all ages through several convention tours and private visits to my Run Room. See Replacing the "gear and shaft assembly" . This repair was done when the parts were more readily available. I do leave the Gear Box Cover loose so I can double check the strings on the gears .
