Lately, I have been rebuilding several LGB locomotives for a friend. The latest one had me perplexed in that it was only picking up power on the trailing set of wheels. These wheels were pitted with plating loss. There was no continuity between the driving wheel pickups and the motor. I stripped the loco down to its very last screw and carefully reassembled (replacing all carbon brush pickups and springs) only to find the problem still current. I then decided to look into the electrical circuit board. I know as much of circuit boards as I do atomic nuclear physics (which is zilch), but even blind Freddy could see that the circuit board could not possibly pass current to the motor. The power pickups from the driving wheels terminated at a dead end junction. The power pickup from the only functioning pickup, the trailing bogie axle, used a different path to get continuity.
I decided that I needed to bridge the terminated driving wheel pickup to the functioning power pickup and finally had a positive result. The loco was supplied ex-factory some twenty five years ago with no power pickup from all six driving wheels. This explains the degraded condition of the only functioning power pickup as it needed to conduct all the current.
LGB Harz 2-6-2
Re: LGB Harz 2-6-2
The 'fun' never stops. This afternoon a new but twenty plus year old #2085 Mallett under test would have the front truck constantly seizing. This reqyuired a stripdown and rectification. A rebuild followed with the loco performing as the maker intended. Yesterday afternoon was fitting a sound decoder to a 2010 Chinese made LGB Mogul along with rectifying an out of quarter problem with the drive. Now runs like the proverbial Swiss watch. Almost a full time job fixing other people's locomotives.