Trouble with Percy and James

   The pair of connecting rods should be arranged so each wheel gets an oil tang.   

  I.e., match the side with no tang on the connecting rod with the tang of the drive rod.

  I don't have either one to guess why it may be binding.

These engines have sloppy rods, but shouldn't bind. On Percy, are the nylon plastic washers between the wheel and rod present?

On James, is the side rod screw spacers present?

I didn't include any pics of James, so I should probably point out that James is an 0-6-0 and has only a side rod, no main rod - but he suffers a similar binding fate to Percy, and like Percy, it seems to originate from a very sloppy fit of parts. Check this link.

Chuck Sartor posted:

These engines have sloppy rods, but shouldn't bind. On Percy, are the nylon plastic washers between the wheel and rod present?

On James, is the side rod screw spacers present?

There are two plastic washers that appear OK, a third is distorted badly and the 4th one is missing. On James, the metal spacers are all present.

The binding is due to the excessive sloppiness. On Percy, the front wheel gets close to 90 degrees out of phase with the rear wheel on the same side

Without seeing your engines, is it possible with Percy that the front wheels were removed and turned 180 degrees? Do the rods bind when the engines are on the track?

The shoulder screws are two different sizes - get the micrometer out and compare to #11 & #34 in this parts list - for percy

One should fit the round hole - rear wheel - nicely and the front wheel should fit the width of the slot for sliding - measure the hole and slots -

perhaps the parts were mixed between engines or the wrong parts used

OK, I went to the dungeon to shoot another short video of the binding action. With no side or main rods installed, I fired it up - just the motor and the rear wheels spinning and discovered that an erratic motion was present - seems the wheels weren't quite true on the axle, and one side was actually rubbing the frame just a bit on every revolution. I guess I didn't hear the rubbing amidst the clunking noise of the rods banging around.

I disassembled everything, squeezed the wheels ever so judiciously in the vise (no wheel cups for these wheels!) and everything got much straighter - cleaned old grease, re-lubed, reassembled and discovered the agony that is trying to get the eyeball stick into the square hole! Not a job for those short on patience. 

Everything runs much smoother now, but the side and main bars have not been reinstalled yet. I need to get all four thin plastic washers in place before proceeding. I'll check my small hardware box in the morning - I'm done for the night.

BTW, what is the order of assembly - is it screw/washer/side rod/wheel? Or is it screw/side rod/washer/wheel

Carl - I did check the shoulder screws, both are different as you stated and the short one is in front, long in back where two rods ride on the shoulder.

Chuck - I thought about what you said and did the mental gymnastics of taking the wheels/axle assy off and turning it around - it wouldn't make any difference. If the wheels were properly quartered in the first place, turning the axle assy 180 degrees won't matter. Just for giggles I went back down to the dungeon and "hands on" eyeballed it, and all wheels are properly aligned with respect to the side and drive rods. 

If things are still clunking after reassembly tomorrow, I'll shoot a short video to show how erratic the motion is. At times, you can actually see the front wheels stop, reverse direction briefly, then get going in the proper direction again - keep in mind, all of this happens in a nano-jiffy, but it happens with nearly every revolution of the wheels!

  The 0-6-0 is whats refered to as an "inside the frame loco", driven in between the frame sides vs  cylinders outboard of the wheels.

And I think I was wrong here. In all the picrures I saw, the driven wheel on Percy actually got the perfect hole and the elongated went to the front.  

Well, I failed to shoot a video of just how erratic Percy was behaving, but I did come up with a solution.

After reassembling (side rods and main rods) to the little green engine, he ran just as badly as before, requiring extra voltage in order not to stall, and quite literally jerking his way down the track, clunking all the way!

After checking thru my parts drawers, I found some aluminum spacers - think of tiny aluminum pipes that were formed by rolling small rectangular pieces of aluminum into a tubular shape. The spacers are 1" long by just a little bit wide. I slipped one of the hollowed out spacers onto the shoulder screw and it was a near perfect fit onto the shoulder, requiring just a bit of pressure to open the seam a very tiny amount, thus keeping the spacer secured nicely.

Next step was to cut small pieces off this "tube" and make inserts - little rings that would fit around the shoulder on each screw - the Dremel worked well for this task. After fashioning 4 such pieces, I slipped them all onto the shoulder screws and reassembled everything once more. The play was dramatically reduced and Percy now scoots down the track with just the tiniest herky-jerky motion - not even noticeable unless you are looking for it. I'm not sure how long the soft aluminum spacers will last, but at least for the time being Percy is being very useful. 

This kind of brings me back to my original question; it's hard to believe Lionel would release anything that has this much play in the side rod mechanism. Has anyone else experienced this?

Now, on to James - although not as bad as Percy, in his present state I can rotate the front wheels about 40 degrees while holding the rear wheels stationary. Again, the hardware doesn't really seem to show much wear, but maybe my eyes are bad - or maybe they're not.