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Todd
I have installed DCC in 5 brass locomotives, 3 of them were steam with the old motors yet I was able to clean and lube them and they do fine with DCC. I also did a diesel with the old motor and it was OK. The one I had trouble with had been custom powered wit 2 of the best can motors that you could buy. It shorted everytime I tried to run it with DCC. I had to find some old Athearn trucks that didn't short and cut back to one motor which was all it needed. I hope you don't have any problems. I am sure you know to run it on DC first to make sure it runs to begin with.
Isn't it nice to have something to blame for our addiction to trains....  ....I love this thread
Charlie
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I was pretty sure you've been down this road before, Charlie, and thanks for the tips. What you're trying to get across to me is that there may be hope left in the old girl and not to chuck the baby with the bath water - the old motor might be rehabilitate-able (not a word, but you get the intent)! That's good news...
Yep, I'll run that baby with the analog option on my DCC system and see what I have to work with before tearing her down. This project is getting better already, and yes, people like you DO INDEED inspire me to expand the empire!
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(08-08-2024, 02:56 PM)TMo Wrote: I was pretty sure you've been down this road before, Charlie, and thanks for the tips. What you're trying to get across to me is that there may be hope left in the old girl and not to chuck the baby with the bath water - the old motor might be rehabilitate-able (not a word, but you get the intent)! That's good news...
Yep, I'll run that baby with the analog option on my DCC system and see what I have to work with before tearing her down. This project is getting better already, and yes, people like you DO INDEED inspire me to expand the empire!
Todd, if a remotor is needed you might be able to use a powertrain from an Atlas, Athearn or such. I am not sure but I think those had AAR type B trucks which are not that uncommon, and used by everyone except EMD (they used AAR type A). I had the most problems with the trucks shorting when they hit the steps on the one locomotive that was a problem child. Isolating the frame was not possible withe the original (in the case A-1- A ) trucks.
You won't have any problem you can't work out for sure. I m looking forward to your build.
Charlie
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Thanks, Charlie. I had given some thought to purchasing an old blue box Athearn, a yellow box Atlas or even an AHM with the same truck setup that was aesthetically beaten but ran well. The gutting would consist of removing the full powertrain and replacing the trucks and gear towers and figuring out how to integrate same and then add DCC.
One of the nice features (and after some research turns out this unit is an RS2 not an RS3 as advertised) of the unit I bought is the light towers on each corner. I'm thinking of drilling them out and installing a small LED in each one and adding some extra lighting effects. In terms of real Conrail, this unit was quickly sent to the deadline and probably never put into service before being sold for scrap. However, I'm going to take some liberties and pretend someone had an affinity for this unit and saved it for locals.
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Todd, here is a picture of the 953 on the way for scrap 10-12-1977. I did not ever see the unit you have.
Vharlie
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What a beaut! Gives me some good weathering ideas - only pictures I've found of 954 are a pretty beaten unit by 1976.
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A box arrived containing this little brass beauty today, and I decided to divert an hour or so this evening to checking it out.
My initial thought was to run it DC through my Prodigy Express2 to check functionality. Errnnnntttt!!!! After a little research, system does not support DC. I'd already given away all of my DC throttles and an older DCC Prodigy that had a DC option, but all I really needed to verify motor, gear and light operation was something in the range of 0 to 12 Volts DC. Got out my drawer of static AC/DC transformers and picked a 6V and a 12V, wired up a couple of track joiners and got a couple of sections of flex track. Set it all up in my workshop and checked - all systems good to go - motor runs, lights light, gears make the thing move. The only negative is the noise. Sounds like my wife's mixer when she's mashing potatoes. Well, maybe not that bad, but considerably louder than any of my other locomotives. I'm thinking about doing a teardown and a full stem-to-stern lubrication and cleaning to see if maybe I can reduce the noise. As a backup, this weekend I into a couple of auctions for a Athearn can motor (won), and I put in a best offer for a Southern Pacific RS2 (I believe it's an AHM) that the owner claimed "does not run well". Perfect donor in case I have to regear (I hope). One of the "huge" differences between the AHM and this brass unit is the size of the railings. The AHM piping might be 5 to 6 times larger in diameter (especially on the front and rear railings, and just makes the thing scream "FAKE!" in comparison to the one pictured. The AHM also doesn't have the grab irons or the corner lighting or bell.
Paint job is pretty good (considering the age) except for some green specs on the top surface of the cab and long hood. The photo below shows some of this on the top of the long hood above the area between "E" and "L" between "Erie" and "Lackawanna". I suspect that it's corrosion. Brass is a copper alloy, so verdigris should be expected if it's not stored in a cool dry place. The locations of the specs don't bother me at all since I will eventually weather it to something only a mother could love, with the top surfaces getting particularly abused.
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Todd that is a beautiful locomotive. We will all look forward to seeing photos of the unit as work progresses.
Charlie
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Got a little time to tear open the RS2 last night before heading to bed. I was tired of cutting, folding and gluing paper. Discovered a few things.
1) This might become one of the simplest DCC conversions ever (aside from those "plug and play" types). The motor has big ole' solder tabs, the track pickups are right on top of the gear towers and the incandescent lights have already been routed with plenty of extra wire length. The gear towers are isolated from the chassis via a set of washers that the gear towers pivot on - I'll check for any continuity with a multimeter in the coming days, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to get an open circuit between the chassis and track. I'll also look for an open circuit between the chassis and either of the motor connections.
2) Pretty darn clean!
3) The power transfer from the motor to the gear towers is through 2 universal joints that use 3 equally spaced pins to connect to the mating joints on the motor and gear towers. After wiggling them free it looks like one of u-joints has become debonded from it's metal rod - nothing that some epoxy can't fix toot sweet. While I'm at it I might just epoxy all of the joints - if one failed, they might all be ready to go.
4) If all of my efforts to tighten up the power transfer are successful and some of the noise is reduced, I'm thinking of going with the original motor. I do have a can motor coming just in case, but that's going to require some adaptation.
5) Just ran the chassis with the motor uncoupled from the gear towers and not tightened down to the frame, and the thing isn't that loud. If I tighten down the motor in the chassis and the vibration resonates through the chassis. I'm thinking a piece of Isodamp between motor and chassis is going to go a long way to significant noise reduction.
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Built some more of the warehouse and then took a break to lube the gears in each gear tower and in the trucks with some gear lubricant. Checked out the function in both directions of travel by turning each gear tower by hand. Gears and spinning nicely without any chatter. No sign of chipping or wear of any of the gear components and I see no reason to swap this gear set out. Aesthetically, the brass trucks don't have the same depth of detail as the modern plastics, but I'm good with these.
As I indicated in my last post, if I can just dampen some of the vibration transfer between the motor and chassis and increase the integrity of the universals, I think I'll be quite pleased with the function of this locomotive.
I'd thought about adding accessory lights on the corner ditch lights, but getting something like a very small LED into those protruding pieces of braised brass is just a bridge too far for me - I'm gonna leave them be.
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08-21-2024, 06:43 PM
(This post was last modified: 08-21-2024, 06:46 PM by TMo.)
Sorry for the length and technical minutia of this post, it may be a great treatment for insomnia....
Kicking some ideas around regarding this brass KTM RS2 unit. I received some other follow-on purchases including an Athearn can motor with dual flywheels, a Digitrax DN136D DCC decoder, and an AHM RS2 (bought for potential donor parts). Yeah, I do want to make this a DCC unit to run on my layout, so the decoder was a no-brainer. However, before wiring up the decoder, I'm having second thoughts about the original motor. The fact that I have a nice quiet unattached dual flywheel unit is eating at me.
Despite my attempts to dampen the noise of this Japanese motor, it's still quite loud. The Athearn motor was a decent deal on evil-bay and I bought it soon after winning the auction for the EL RS2, after reading about the KTM units' reputation for annoyingly noisy operation. So, I've been looking at real estate and the potential for re-use of the original gear towers. Here's a shot of the can motor laid into the center of the KTM chassis.
In order to fit the Athearn motor in the motor mount bracket (the removable section in the center of the locomotive), if the replacement is going to happen I'm going to have to notch out the front and rear of the bracket to allow the motor to drop so the output shafts from the motor are at the same horizontal level as the gear tower shafts. My rough guess on the amount of drop necessary is 0.2 inches to get completely level from the gear towers through the center of the motor.
Here's a shot with the bracket removed to better illustrate a better alignment for the output shafts. The second shot shows that I'll probably have to cut into the runway structure to allow the flywheels to spin unencumbered.
Next problem - adapting output gearing from the can motor to the truck gear towers, and I think I've figured out something that might work - which gets me to the answer to the question "Why in the world would Todd buy an AHM loco?"
I had a "GP18" Lehigh Valley AHM unit as a kid - it actually came with a dummy unit and I loved running those until numerous derailings and falls rendered each a total loss. All plastic with a couple of strategically located lead weights, not prototypical, but back in those days my budget was quite limited, so Tyco and AHM were very popular producers of my rolling stock. One of the great things about our hobby now is that the quality of rolling stock and locomotives is miles better than in the late 1970's, but that crappy stuff still makes it to swap meets and model railroading shows, and there's still a ton of it on ebay. All I really wanted from the AHM RS2 were potentially the motor, output shafts, trucks and gear towers in case I wanted to swap those out too. The model I picked up is a Southern Pacific RS2, which, by the way, the SP never rostered. The thing was coated in dust and debris, but after running it a bit the motor started working decently. We'll set that aside for now.
The Athearn motor was shipped with two output knuckles that accept Athearn's standard dogbone shaft, which they sell in a bunch of different lengths. The problem, however, is how to interface with the truck gear towers, and that's where I think I can use some of the AHM parts. In the photo below, I've removed the standard Athearn ouput knuckle sleeve, and connected the universal knuckle to ball and pin shaft from the AHM unit that adapts to the Athearn knuckle in each flywheel, and then the output knuckle (next item to the right in the photo) from the AHM motor that I'm planning on either drilling out to fit the shaft on the gear tower after I remove the TKM rubber universal joint, or buying one predrilled to the right size. I think with some good measurements it looks like I can buy an output knuckle that will fit the gear tower shaft and the AHM ball.
If I look at the total length between the ends of the AHM output knuckles on either side of the motor, I come up with 4.75 inches in total length. From gear to gear on each gear tower, the total distance is 4.9 inches, so there's a little room for slop as the trucks rotate through curves. The end result of all of this hypothetical nonsense is that I believe it would be possible to integrate the can motor to the existing gear towers, and it becomes more and more likely that I may eventually get out the Dremel and start making modfications rather than just do a straight conversion to DCC on this little beast.
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TMo,
Watching you go through these makes me want to try tackling some repower projects and digging in to old models.
Good work!
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Modeling the East Broad Top as it was between 1937-1942
~Amanda
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Measured up the steel gearshafts - 0.093" according to a set of calipers and found a bit of the same size. Ended up putting it in the chuck of a drill press, but rather than turn on the motor, I just twisted the plastic knuckles up onto the bit through the smaller hole to take away the extra material. Nice friction fit when all was said and done. When I came home from work today I got the cutting wheel back out and took the extra length off of the forward shaft and inserted both knuckles on the front and rear shafts and slid in the motor with the shafts connected. Looks like a nice fit to me in terms of longitudinal slop and ability to move the locomotive through a curve and maintain power to the gearing, but I still see some impingement between the flywheels and the chassis that I'll have to address before adding the DCC decoder. As NASA would say, everything's looking good for eventual launch.
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Very nicely done Todd. You did the right thing by replacing the original motor.
Charlie
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