Lionel Legacy Smoke Unit-Never Seen This Before....

It's clear you have gotten moisture in there at some point, or perhaps before you got it.  Is there signs of rust on other hardware inside the unit?

Replacing the resistor, mounting screws, and the fan motor should revive the smoke unit.

Boy, That's ugly! I have never seen this before. If I was to venture to guess some acidic substance got on the smoke unit.  Do you have any battery acid laying around?

John: The rest of the unit is pristine-no rust anywhere; in fact, I purchased this set new from Marty Fitzhenry, so I doubt anything ever happened to them while he owned them. They have been in air conditioned spaces since I bought them.

Luckily, I have an 8 ohm wire-wound resistor on hand, so I'll replace it and clean up the motor housing until I make another parts purchase from Lionel. The fan still runs according to the BIT program. I'll know soon enough. BTW, can anybody see on the #38759 parts diagram the actual resistor mounting screws? Too small a picture for me to pick them out.....?

FWIW: Lionel parts lists two 8 ohm resistors; the wire-wound type I have on hand and the solid element shown in the picture. My consternation is the type in the picture is five time the cost of the $2.00 wire-wound resistor.......

Maybe this is nothing to do with the corrosion but that resistor in the photo looks wrong or damaged. These smoke units are pretty similar across Legacy diesels and all have wire-wound resistors. A ceramic-coated resistor looks to me like a substitute - if you got this new maybe at the factory if the parts box was otherwise empty! Seems very odd.

Anyway I'd replace it with the standard 8 ohm resistor you have as I am sure the smoke unit's spec is keyed to that.

P.S. Looks like there might be frayed/broken wire attached to that resistor and indeed corrosion on the screws that hold it. Hard to think of what might have caused this but it might be acid/soldering flux although there would need to be a fair bit of it.

If it came from Marty, I don't think it was an obvious fault, I know he wouldn't do that.  I'd guess, in that case, that something happened during the manufacture of the smoke unit, and it doesn't affect the rest of the engine.  I don't know if you remember my F40PH with the rusted coupler and drop bar, it was some acidic cleaning fluid the factory used.

Other than the resistor is corroded and dead, it doesn't look out of place to me.  Sure looks a lot like the picture in the parts breakdown.

691RES8OHM     SMOKE RESISTOR / 8 OHM     70     $2.00

It is a wire-wound resistor, it's just ugly dirty.   You can even see the wires that are hanging off the sides.

I've had products from Lionel that came with rusted parts, in particular a new-in-the-environmentally-friendly-package Vision Line GE Evo with corroded wheels. The damage here sure does look like something that happened at the factory; it's not moisture/storage-related.

What looks like green residue on the resistor fooled me into thinking it's a ceramic coated one like those I get from Digi-Key, which have that color coating. Looks like the wire winding was mostly dissolved, which points to acid I think.

Could be the same crap they used on my F40PH.   Acid it a good guess, it's ugly, that's for sure!

Thanks for the input gentlemen; many heads are always better than my one. I think you guys may be on to something as far as acid contamination goes; I looked at the resistor remains under magnification and I can see evidence of there ONCE having been wire wound around the ceramic barrel. There are traces of it remaining on the top half of the barrel, but the bottom is as white as a sheet and no wire element to be found anywhere.

The corrosion on the fan motor housing and the screws that hold the element to the PCB itself does not remind me of water-based corrosion. This residue is gunky, black and tar like. The situation got worse when I removed the fan impeller to unscrew the fan motor from the smoke bowl. The two motor attaching screws were also corroded to the motor itself and I noted more black residue around the motor impeller shaft. While trying to get the screws unstuck, I had to apply enough pressure to keep the screwdriver from stripping the screw heads. What ultimately happened is that pressure on the screwdriver actually pushed the fan motor out from the bottom of the bowl with the screws still attached to the motor. There was actually about .002" worth of phenolic/plastic bowl between the screw-heads and the motor casing; so, it's off to order another smoke unit assembly and start over. ( The screw-heads were really recessed into the bowl from the top....).

Maybe I'll press my luck and un-cork the lids on the other "A" unit and PWD "B".......

I think I'd certainly look the other two units over!

Hi D&H65, it's not a bad idea to see what the rest of the like power units look like.

I'm a little concerned that if this damage is due to acid contamination some of the residue could cross contaminate your new replacement hardware.  It might be a good idea to take a Q-tip with a mixture backing soda and water and wipe down all the surrounding mounting assembly. After you have it clean and dry and I stress dry, take another Q-tip with some rubbing alcohol on it and clean it again. That is to remove the baking soda residue and any remaining water.

I have had some luck with this technique in cleaning corroded battery compartments from post war engines to ground power equipment in the Air Force. Of course with the 24 V Lead acid batteries in the GP Equip I used cleaning tools larger then a Q-Tip.

If this is acid damage any contaminated paint may peal off.   

Next time remove the D-Cell battery before storage

Seriously, though, hope you get that sorted out.

Bad smoke fluid? might want to check your other engines?

I can't even conceive of any scenario where smoke fluid would do that, especially the smoke motor.  The fluid shouldn't be there.  This seems most likely to be an issue during the original production since it's just limited to the smoke unit.  The good news is, it's a fairly cheap fix.

D&H 65 your original post states a #1 fault code. I assume you mean it was throwing off 1 blink on the cab light flashing? (sorry if I am splitting hairs here). I only ask because a single flash of the cab light indicates a drive line issue (or in the case of a dummy unit, the hall effect sensor input is not functioning). The cab light flashes are as follows;

1 flash = drive line bind (dummy units, no hall effect input)
2 flashes = Primary smoke unit element malfunction (shorting or wrong resistance)
3 flashes = Primary smoke unit fan motor malfunction (too high of a current draw)
4 flashes = Secondary smoke unit element malfunction (shorting or wrong resistance)
5 flashes = Secondary smoke unit fan motor malfunction (too high of a current draw)

These fault codes can be rest by pressing AUX1 + 0 (although you can only do this 3 times). The fault codes are there to prevent burning out outputs on the RCMC (the most expensive part of the circuit). however, if you do want to risk burning out the RCMC outputs you can cycle power on and off and you can reset the fault codes 3 more times and so on. But be warned! If you keep this up you'll not only be replacing a fan motor or smoke element, but also an RCMC! (which translates into you can make a $15.00 repair cost $125.00 in parts!)

Probably the most common error code is 3 or 5 flashes. This can occur at 9am and disappear at 9:10am. It has a lot to do with where the armature is positioned on the brushes (inside the fan motor). When the RCMC output turns on and sees a current draw too high it shuts the output off and throws the blinking light code. Often times you can hit AUX1 + 0, then turn the smoke on again the fan turns on. In my experience this happens most frequently with the 11mm fan motors. The 15mm fan motors rarely cause the RCMC to throw this code. The problem is the larger fan motors do not fit well in applications where the 11mm motor was used (you typically run into issues where the 15mm motors hit the frame or the side of the shell/boiler). So its not just an easy swap out of a motor to correct the issue once and for all. I typically tell people to shoot a quick blast of compressed air down the smoke stack (and I mean a quick blast, otherwise you shoot smoke fluid everywhere!) this will cause the impeller to spin slightly and change the position of the fan motor armature, then the output of the RCMC runs the fan motor without an issue!

The corrosion on that motor does not look good, I have never seen that personally in all my years of tearing into the guts of a locomotive (unless the loco was subjected to a great deal of moisture, but then you would have rusty screw heads, rusted wheels, etc.) if its just the smoke fan motor and nothing else I can honestly say I have never seen that before! As GRJ said, its a simple inexpensive fix! 

Sorry for the rant!
Mike

Mike: Thanks for the info! My bad; I did have two cab light flashes, not one.

Another data point to add to this adventure; I opened up my SP PWD "B" unit along with the PWD "A" unit this morning to check on those smoke unit components. While I didn't find corroded fan motor casings in either unit, I did find the smoke resistor in the "B" unit had the same failure as the DMY "A" unit experienced-it just didn't have a blinking cab light to alert me of that (although it did NOT smoke yesterday either...). I replaced the resistor in that one and it works now. (This failed "B" unit resistor also had the gunked-up crud on the bolts holding the resistor to the PCB).

Since you were instrumental in seeing up the parts Dept. Mike, I need some tips on ordering from "Lionelsupport.com"....; to whit - when I go to a particular unit # loco (say 38759 for my DMY "A") it brings up the broken down parts list and lets you "Add to cart" however many units of that part you want. My issue comes when I "Search" for a particular generic P/N (say 640-8036-055 -spring / 610-31-6656-J3a electro-coupler of 1.55"). It always comes back with a response of "0 items found". So my question is-how do I get the Search function to actually find theses numbers so I can add them to my shopping cart?

Thanks for any help on this.

One other question; the parts breakdown for my DMY "A" unit shows the PCB and also the separate resistors; unfortunately I need the complete smoke unit due to the phenolic/plastic bowl failure. The complete assembly is NOT listed for purchase. Any way around that issue?

There are 2 criterias for searching the parts page: 

Product number or name (you enter the 6- number here OR enter the number/hash tag symbol (#) then the cab number. The results will pull up the results for all exploded view parts lists.

Replacement part number or name: this is where you search for parts only. Never enter dashes in the part number! For example: 691-R2LC-C08 should be entered as 691R2LCC08. You can also enter the part name, like Railsounds and every part with "railsounds" in the part name will return. The only limitation here is the system will only return 500 parts at a time. So you may need to modify the part name further to reduce the results to less than 500.

thanks,

Mike