oiling a loud smoke unit fan

Ideally you need to remove the top of the smoke unit, gently pull off the fan impeller with a pair of needlenose and put a drop of oil on the motor shaft bushing. Oiling where you see the fan willget oil on the impeller but not the bushing where the problem is.

If this is a brand new loco it may be best to send it in to MTH for warranty or take it to a local dealer/ service center if there is one nearby.

The noisy fan could mean that the motor bearing is dry and that will kill the motor. It could also mean that the fan has slipped on the shaft and is rubbing on the motor.

Either way, if you can see the fan, put some oil on it, not WD-40, and roll the loco around in your hands to try to get the oil through the fan blades and onto the other side of the fan and to the bearings.

The worst that can happen is that you slop oil in there and have to take it apart. The best that could happen is that the motor gets quiet.

Thanks for the replies guys. It appears that this problem is intermittent, as it will come and go during the course of an operating session. I just ran the M1 a few minutes ago and the fan started off noisy, but got much quieter during the 15 minutes or so that I ran it. I guess I'll take a wait and see approach. As others have posted before, the entire motor itself is not a very expensive part, so if it does go out it's not the end of the world. By the way, how common is this problem nowadays?

I would recommend trying MegaSteam's Eliminator. It has also been known to quiet noisy smoke unit motors at times.

http://megasteam.com/page20.html

Ok guys, here's the skinny. I took an older railking J apart to experiment with. It's a 4-5 year old proto 2 engine. I successfully removed the motor, pulled the fan blade, oiled the shaft and replaced everything. It works perfectly! Now onto the new Pennsy M1A......different story altogether! I successfully removed the shell without an issue. However, the exterior of the smoke unit is coated in some type of red grease that is extremely slick and it makes it diffacult to hold onto the unit while you are trying to get the screws out. The screws were impossible! It almost felt like some type of thread locking compound had been applied to the threads as they would not budge. In the end I decided that it wasn't worth messing something up in order to fix the loud fan. I will live with the fan noise until the motor fails. Who knows, it may never fail and I'll just always have a noisy fan.