Graham Radish

3D printing is a very bad idea for manufacturing things like this, its slow, inaccurate and quite frankly looks awful, it will probably take another 10 years before its as good as injection molding. trying to 3d print n gauge stuff would be hilarious,

If i was to model in OO again i would choose LIMA, some may laugh, simply because with these models you can do a lot to them to make them even better than Bachmann, its fun to do as well, you can make them your own and at a much lower cost, ie, replacing motors/adding extra detail etc. i made a thread about this im on a mission to get the best locos lima made like the excellent class 31 for example and make them run as smooth as silk, also you have a lot of room to work with in these locos meaning you can install very complicated lighting and huge DCC sound speakers, in turn i get much more satisfaction from this hobby doing things this way. But it doesn't stop there, you can even fit two motors to the larger locos, in turn this gives a huge amount torque when pulling things like real coal/gravel. i love the idea of this and this is going to be my next venture in this hobby. to be honest for the sake of about 30 quid you can make them look bloody amazing.

For those that bash LIMA, most of their better models have very accurate bodyshells, in fact in most cases beating Bachmann

I'm noticing more lately that some sellers are listing locos 'especially OO gauge for some reason' as NEW but looking at the pictures they have clearly been tampered with, i have also seen a couple of NEW listings and the models have glue marks all over them, i think ebay needs a team of specialized moderators to sort this problem out. I've even seen a loco advertised as NEW and they have no box and are on show on a garden wall, the model clearly had scratches on it and the decals worn off. One way to sort this would be to get manufacturers to fit a seal to the packaging. How do they get away with this?

Just found this article on the class 31, it looks superb with some patience: Lima Class 31

See if you can get hold of a cheap rolling road mate and a 5 or 6v DC power supply, not 12 or 14v as you dont want to run it in at full speed

Closest i can get to a clayton in N is a class 14

Damn! you are right, just looked on eBay, it's a lovely model i bet with lights and sound it would be brill. so far looking through this thread the 31 and 50 are my favorite two locos.

I know a lot of people will disagree with this but in my opinion the better lima models were twice as good as the modern Bachmann virgin voyager, that loco is piss poor inside and out, runs like a bag of spanners has terrible electronics and an underpowered motor

Thing is with lima apart from the comedy couplers, they can be real nice models, i think lima are absolutely brilliant for DCC as you have the room to fit very large speakers, should imagine it wouldnt be too hard to fit NEM couplers

Claytons are awesome, and the Heljan one is a great model, does it have sound?

Hello, on this one i'm curious, which in your opinion were the best LIMA diesel, diesel/electric locos ever made? First train set i ever owned was a LIMA in the early 80's (about 1983) it was some sort of shunter, possibly a german rebrand? looked a bit like a class 14 Anyway any thoughts on this, i do have a soft spot for lima! cheers.

Planned obsolescence and laziness fella yes, a model maker like Bachmann should know better, they way it is at the moment that motor will be dead in a few weeks maybe less, yet they charge top prices which is very annoying to say the least.

In the case of this loco due to it having a plastic housing, i highly recommend you thermal epoxy a 1mm sheet of aluminium to the bottom of the motor, or wherever you can find clearance, wow this is a very poor design im not surprised they run so bad, years ago i had the Bachmann voyager set, it also ran like a pig. you could also make a U shaped heatsink that fits around the motor itself, you could either use thermal epoxy or computer CPU thermal heatsink compound (ARCTIC MX4) if you can get it to clip on. thermal epoxy has a bond stronger than the motor itself so its never gonna come off, as i say doing this will dramatically drop temperatures in some cases it will halve it. as it stands theres no escape path for the heat and it just keeps building up, doing this will cure it permanently and double the motors life. All farish locos have the same problem but their split metal chassis makes it easy to add thermal material. But before you do anything lift up the carbon bush holders and add a drop of servisol super10 to each side, this stuff takes wear off the bushes and motor stator and ensures optimal performance. Note: due to this being OO gauge and not N, you should have enough room to fit a 20mm x 10mm fan, thats another option. if this is wired directly to the motor it will speed up and slow down on demand. using a rectifier of course, or can easily be directly connected to a DCC decoders function output then use a function button on your controller to turn it off and on and control its speed. Looking again at this if the chassis has a metal bottom, simply add a piece of thermal pad (1mm) to the underside of the motor. and the chassis, this will cure it. Another option is you could solder a thin sheet of steel to either side of the motor, hope this helps m8 Bachmann could easily cure this by adding 30mm fan blades to the back of each inertia weights.

Yep sorry about this haha