What's wrong with my Lionel Legacy engine's smoke unit?

Seems like Lionel needs to go back to the drawing board for their smoke units.

That's the indication of a bad smoke fan motor.

The sensing circuit runs the fan for a brief moment and if it senses excess current, it shuts it down.

John's totally correct, it needs a fan motor. But I would also change the batting and clean the smoke unit completely. I fix a lot of these units for fellow forum members, what I'm finding when I open them up is an over abundance of smoke fluid. I also find plenty of smoke fluid inside the fan motor's, which seems to me is killing these motor's. Believe it or not, sometimes I blow out the fan motor's with compressed air and they work again. IMO everyone is using way to much smoke fluid.

Thanks,

Alex

That's why my budget for smoke fluid is so large!

I have seen this when there is some fluid on the fan. If you can clear this off you may be able to have it work as it should.

i have used bottled air for this, give it a shot and let  it sit overnight, it has worked for me.

Fred

It was built by Lionel.If you want your Lionel smoke units to work,you better learn how to work on them and actually stock the parts.Nick

Thanks to Gunrunner John my smoke units all work well. I sure had my share of problems with Lionel smoke units.

I have no idea of amount of smoke fluid to add when I refill unit. I fill the syringe that comes with the smoke fluid half full as a guessament. Good? Bad?

Mike Reagan recommends just to the first line on the pipette that comes with the engines.  About 1/4 of it.  1/2 sounds like a lot.

It is possible that "some of these Smoke fan" issues are operator induced. This is just a guess on my part. May be an operator puts smoke fluid in, he sees no smoke, he puts more fluid in, now the smoke reservoir is too full and floods into the fan motor assembly and then it trickles down into the motor brushes/wires and causes the motor to stall. The smoke circuit senses an over current situation due to smoke fluid or motor stalled and shows the three blinks of fan death!....possible?

There have been several threads on this in the past.  The most current one is this one....  https://ogrforum.com/t...39#29023675291328939

Jon from Lionel is looking into these failures as he replied in the above thread I posted above.  Hopefully, he will find a cause to help reduce the number of failures with these motors on Legacy engines out of the box. 

I send Jon Z. a few of the motors I had removed for the flashing cab lights, hopefully that will help him chase it down.  I'm very eager to find out what is going on with them.