I got a beautiful new SOO Line PS3 GP9 recently. When I turned on the smoke I noticed odd behavior. Not quite coming out of the stacks and sort of coming out through the body vents. I took the shell off and was a little confused. I didn't see the normal brass funnel at the top of the smoke unit and the smoke unit didn't look quite right. Actually the funnel had broken off and was stuck in the stack manifold at the top of the shell. Also there were some gaskets that were coming apart and not fitting properly. Ok, so I fixed the funnel by bonding it back on the top of the smoke unit. Also took off the manifold and tossed all of the gaskets (these aren't necessary). When I went to reattach the shell it would not go on in a way that aligned with the fastener holes in the frame. It kept wanting to move to the right. I don't like forcing things so I took a closer look inside to see where the interference was. Aha! The plastic cowling that protects the engineers from the spinning flywheel was too deep in the radial direction (below) and the edges were interfering with the side of the cab. When the assembler had to force the shell on it broke the funnel off the smoke unit. So that was the root cause. In the photo below I replaced the green piece that came with the engine with the grey piece from my engine graveyard. All better. Maybe some growing pains for MTH 2.0. Not that I have any intention of not buying more MTH but I thought the problem was kind of interesting.
