Hornby r2287

[M1JWR]

After a few years i got out the fowler tank loco, on test it ran with a squeak, so did the usual thing and gave it a touch of lube here and there, the main gear from the motor was very dry to start with, i also cleaned up the pick ups which are strips that connect to two points, re assembled, easy enough, and now it dosent run at all,dead, cant think what ive done wrong here, on assembly made sure that the pick up points aligned with the two connections, i discovered it has a dcc chip, no dcc here and never had a problem in the past, all ive done since then is checked continuity, there is connection from wheels at one side to the earth point on top near motor, the two connections at the other end of the motor are no contact from anywhere, of course they go though dcc chip first i would think, i know nothing about dcc chips, i am no stranger to resurecting locos, and have done with old school ringfields x04's and spider motors many times, this one has me a bit stumped, can anybody help prevent this from becoming a mantlepiece ornament.

[cypherman]

Hi,

Have you damaged the chip?. Do you have a blanking chip you could try in its place? Also try double-checking that all the wheels are the right way round and one not reversed and is causing a short. You do not say whether the motor runs if you power it up separately.

[M1JWR]

Hi

dont have a blanking chip, never had the wheels off so they are out of the equasion, thought you couldent put dc direct to motor without damaging the chip, so havent done that,

part of me thinks its a short in some way as ive had that before with dc loco's, the other part thinks of the chip but in that case i have no way of knowing for sure.

[mkrob]

Unless I'm mistaken, you can remove the dcc decoder & just link pins 1 & 8 together then pins 4 & 5 together which does what a blanking plug does. As you can see on the diagram, it connects the motor to each rail. You can Heath Robinson that with a paper clip or a piece of wire.

[M1JWR]

Thanks for the reply's, looks like a sealed unit, i take it there is no way to cheat the system, ie join the orange wire to ground where the red is and the grey wire directly to the black wire, old school and bye bye dcc chip,or in otherwords as you say but using the wires only, i have posted a pic

Edited September 24, 2022 by M1JWR

[micklner]

The decoder is covered in a red plastic insualtor,should come off fairly easily.

[cypherman]

9 hours ago, M1JWR said:

Thanks for the reply's, looks like a sealed unit, i take it there is no way to cheat the system, ie join the orange wire to ground where the red is and the grey wire directly to the black wire, old school and bye bye dcc chip,or in otherwords as you say but using the wires only, i have posted a pic

Hi,

Yes, you can cheat the system, as you say. It is very easy to rewire the loco to run as DC only. I have recently done this to a friend's Coronation class loco. You just need to strip out all the DCC wiring and chip. Take one power wire from the pick-ups and solder it to one of the motor brush contacts. Then run a wire from the chassis and solder that to the other motor brush contact. That is, as long as you only want to run your loco as a DC engine. Rewiring for DCC is possible, but a bit more complicated. There is one other option, Your motor is buggered and needs replacing. The easiest and safest way I know to test your motor and not destroy your DCC chip is to remove the DCC chip and the put power directly to the motor. It will run or not, as the case may be.

Edited September 25, 2022 by cypherman

[mkrob]

Cypherman is correct in what he says,but looking at your photo,the valve gear mechanism does not look straight in bottom section of the photo,locking up the drive. But it may be an optical illusion!

[M1JWR]

hopefully i think i may have a bit of a breakthrough here, i disconnected the chip and wired the 2 motor connections to dc direct, motor working.

however there was no connection on black wire from left pick ups, 2 pairs of specs later i have now seen the actual problem, underneath there are two contact points

for the pick ups, round holes if you like with metal looking pins in the middle of them, the one for the left looks to have dropped back down the hole, thats all it is, getting

it back is gonna be the difficult bit, from that i take it that the black wire from that side is power to the chip and if no connection

there the chip dosent work, mkrob, optical illusion appears correct

[M1JWR]

cured this now, basically a piece of thin cardboard from a fag packet made better compression for the connection when screwing the chassis bottom down,

after all that, thats all it was, had to manipulate the pick ups at the wheels a little aswell, they are pretty crap as with all modern loco's, all seems good now, thanks to all