Lionel Starter Set #30016 NYC 4-4-2, smoke question.

Jeff,

    Most likely you have a air bubble somewhere in the smoke system, blow down the stack hard which should stop the smoke issue you are having. You can use a can of compressed air too but blowing down the stack usually works.

JohnB

The smoke is likely coming around the piston and not from around the stack opening.  When you re-assembled, you may have blocked the air holes and created more back pressure.

Jeff, another trouble-shooting thought to add to John's above...

As you probably experienced, those 4-4-2's are a little bit of a bear to re-assemble, as you have several pieces that all need to line up properly. You have the stack of the smoke unit, which needs to be seated properly inside the opening of the smoke stack casting of the shell. But on the bottom of the smoke unit, there's a little rectangular dimple that needs to be seated (or lined up) properly against the front pilot truck assembly. And of course you need to have the pilot truck assembly lined up and "connected" with the motor frame assembly. But then the holes in the pilot truck assembly need to line up with the mounting holes in the shell casting, so you can screw them in place.

If these parts, when reassembled, don't all line up correctly, that could be a possible reason you're seeing smoke where you don't wish to see it. I've worked on enough of these 4-4-2's to be comfortable, but they are still a bit of a challenge to reassemble. The whole process is made a little bit easier if you remove the side rods from the wheels of the motor frame assembly, reattaching the side rods when you have everything else assembled together.

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One more potential observation from personal experience. I had one 4-4-2 that... I don't recall whether I was seeing smoke come out from the bottom... but I wasn't getting much smoke coming out of the stack, yet I knew the smoke unit worked fine.

So on the smoke unit there's an air chamber with a plastic plunger. Inside that, there's a spring. This does snap apart, so I took it apart and "stretched" the spring just a little bit. This is so that the lever of the smoke unit that hits against the left side rod (connected to the drive wheels), pops back out better. Which makes for a better "push" of air going into the smoke unit, thus resulting in a better puff of smoke coming out of the smoke stack.

I've had this little bugger apart and reassembled more times than I can count! Get the smoke unit stack in place first then assemble everything around it. I did notice that when the truck assembly is slid into place and then screwed in, it doe not hold the stack tight to the underside of the shell. A little tweaking and its better. I'll run it later.