The story of four medium sized Rio Grande locos

[Schraddel]

Oh Wayne tank you, but not so early not so early, i am still not yet finished.





All three running gears. In the foreground the K-59 Mikado with it's Mashima 1830 can motor. Here it was not so simple to get this motor into the outer firebox. This motor is a very smooth runner because of it's 5-pole skew wounded armature, but it represents the absolute maximum seize (18mm x 30mm) squeezeable under the boilershell. I had to "shave" the inner part of the firebox to remove all the inner extending parts of the details and cut them flush with the sheet wall. Also i had to file some of the motor casing at the rear end so that it fit against the forward slanted boiler backhead. A little bit narrower and you have to use a shoehorn to mount the boilershell onto the running gear.
Above the motor, there are plug sockets for front lights and in my case (middle loco) planned cab interior lights. The cabs of the P-44's are full detailed. My friend did'nt want it, so there are front lights only.





All three locos got plugs at the very end of the wires. Thus reducing the multiple chaos of black wires somewhat. The shrinking tube is for insulation purposes and to get a sort of handle for the tiny plugs.
For each of the locos i reserved a separate little plastic box with lids. All the tiny screws and other small parts of each loco will be stored here during work in progress (or not). This avoids, as fas as possible, Murphy's laws according vanishing small parts into the universe...

All three tenders got the same electrical equipment as i described in my first posting in this thread.
My friend wanted his locos equipped with Soundtraxx Econami Steam sound decoders in combination with Zimo speakers, also as shown in the first posting.





My friends K-59.





Both K-59s. And here i worked with JMRI Decoder Pro and simply copied all of the decoder's CVs just from one decoder to the other decoder. That is a very easy task for you were the PC will make the work. Afterward the locos run simlutaneous.





But when running my frieds K-59 alone without sound, there was a growling to hear. As origin was found, the gearbox emitted this noise. And when i stopped the running loco by means of my hand putting into the loco's way, there was a loud and nasty "Krrrrrrrrr" noise to hear, the loco stopped of course and the drivers did stop also rotating and did'nt turn anymore.





The reason was a not correct meshing between idler gear and axle gear. Thus enabling the teeth of both spur gears to slip over each other. This interruped the flux of force, the loco driver came to a standstill and the noise emerged. No, no GERN flux will help here.
The cause was a slightly worn gear cover. As the gears have a very fine gear module (0.3) only a little wear or bending of the gear cover causes too much axle play and this resulting an incorrect mesh. Here in this case it was a mixture of very slightly bending and wear.
To fix it sustainable i soldered two little stripes of 0.15mm bronze sheet onto the worn areas. Then the repair sheets were grinded untill the axle play was near "0", but the axle also was rotating freely. The mesh is now correct and the gearbox runs smooth and quiet.







Here pictures of remounting the valve gears. Don't forget these tiny washers.





My own P-44 Pacific was equipped with one of the brand new Soundtraxx Tsunami2 sound decoders. There are some extra features and possibilities compared against the Econami. Not yet all possibilties tested.





My friend's unpainted P-44 will get it's sound decoder after painting. All the test running was made with an non sound decoder. Also this loco is prepared to make a quick plug-in installation of decoder and speaker.





Both Pacifis.
That is temporarily the end of the task for me. What has still to be done is adjusting and fine tuning of the Tsunami2 of my P-44, but this will be better posted in the DCC departement of this forum.

Thank you for watching.

Cheers Lutz