A small whinge

[DickBrowne]

 Now, I don’t like to complain… oh no, hold on, that’s wrong, I’m a techy. Whinging about stuff is like oxygen. Apparently I’m quite accomplished at it. I do feel I’m justified this time. 
 

Last week I bought a Hornby Ruston 48 in Longmorn livery. 
 

Got it home, ran it on DC, it was a little “stiff” to start, but I put that down to needing to be run in, but I had little time and so I popped it away. 
 

on Friday evening I converted it to DCC and gave it a test. Again, it was reluctant to start, but once going, it was fine. Again, I didn’t have enough time to run it in, so I didn’t worry too much about it, it was just needing the lube spreading around and so on, right?
 

I haven’t had much time to run locos this weekend, I’ve been kit bashing and generally working on the layout, but at 5pm I decided to down tools and run some trains. 
 

Out came the Longmorn, and I decided to run my other 48 on the outer track, and so off they went. 
 

For about four minutes. 
 

The Longmorn stopped and refused to go anywhere. I could hear the motor straining and so took it off the track rather than risk burning out the motor. 
 

Looking at the back of the wheels, they were absolutely covered in runny grease, and there was a load of fibre wound around the axles, as if it had been run on a carpet, but I know that the engine had never been run, as it was brand new stock from a reputable retailer. 
 

To cut a long story short, I had to strip the thing completely, gearbox, base plate and everything. Not a job I expected on a brand new model, but the grease was more like a heavy oil, and was leaking out of the gearbox onto the wheels, and the gearbox was full of fibre too. 
 

Although the 48 was sold as brand new (and I laid full retail for it), I suspect it’s been run at some point and maybe lubricated by somebody with little mechanical sympathy. 
 

I’ve added a few pics to illustrate what I found inside - the fibres, the over-greased gearbox and the sludge. 
 

On the upside, it’s running like a champ now!

 

Has anybody else seen this kind of thing? Was I just unfortunate? I’ve bought a number of locos in my time and never seen one this bad before. 

[micklner]

If you had paid full price for that. Contact the dealer, and return asap.

[kevinlms]

5 hours ago, micklner said:

If you had paid full price for that. Contact the dealer, and return asap.

Except it's been fixed now, so too late!

[DickBrowne]

23 hours ago, micklner said:

If you had paid full price for that. Contact the dealer, and return asap.

I hear you Mick, and I do agree to an extent, but I thought it was an easy (if time-consuming) fix. 
 

As Kevin has mentioned, it’s running as sweet as a nut and I’m over the moon with it. 
 

My whinge is around the original condition. I know this wasn’t the most expensive of items, we’ve all paid more than this and given the quality of the model, it could almost be described as a bargain. 
 

Bargain or not, the fact that a major manufacturer can ship a new model with the issues I found is not a particularly good thing. I’m more than happy to wave a screwdriver at a model, has that not been case, the inconvenience would have been considerable. 
 

 

[micklner]

I agree with what you have said.

 

Bargain or not the makers/dealers need to know what condition the goods is being sold in. People might say its only a train whats the problem, if it was a car etc etc, people would be going mad about what they have been sold.

 

Well done on getting it going !!

[Steamport Southport]

I had similar with one of my Pecketts. Struggling and then suddenly sprang into action leaving a huge dollop of white grease on the test track (just an oval of train set stuff I use to make sure they run to be honest). After that it's as sweet as anything.

 

I would expect it to have congealed whilst it's been on the shelf. The first ones are about four years old after all.

 

The only other model to have had similar was a Bachmann 1P 0-4-4T. Yet my other two of those didn't have that problem. I put it down to an over generous worker at the factory not being stingy with the grease.

 

 

Jason

[melmerby]

I had a Bachmann pannier(?) that was a little reluctant.

A similar problem, full of grease like hard margarine. Once cleaned out it ran like a dream.

 

[The Johnster]

I get rid of the grease on any loco I acquire that has it, new or 2h.  It attracts gunge and grit, not good for the worms and cogs it is intended to protect, and will sooner or later solidify and become the opposite of a lubricant (a stifficant?).  The amount of time before this happens seems completely unpredictable and follows no observable pattern, but it will happen; it is as inevitable as death and taxes.  

 

I use electrical contact cleaner in a rattlecan;,don’t let WD40 anywhere near your locos because it doesn’t lubricate anything and will eat plastic!  The contact cleaner is a powerful enough spray to blast the grease out of the mech, and I then leave it while the cleaner evaporates off before applying a non-mineral machine oil with a hypodermic syringe.  If you haven’t got a hypo, a drop on the end of a pin will do just as well.  The trick is to lubricate all the points shown in the service manual, but as sparingly as possible.  
 

If you are lacking a service manual because you bought the loco 2h, they are available as pdfs from the manufacturers’ websites.  

[kevinlms]

12 hours ago, DickBrowne said:

I hear you Mick, and I do agree to an extent, but I thought it was an easy (if time-consuming) fix. 
 

As Kevin has mentioned, it’s running as sweet as a nut and I’m over the moon with it. 
 

My whinge is around the original condition. I know this wasn’t the most expensive of items, we’ve all paid more than this and given the quality of the model, it could almost be described as a bargain. 
 

Bargain or not, the fact that a major manufacturer can ship a new model with the issues I found is not a particularly good thing. I’m more than happy to wave a screwdriver at a model, has that not been case, the inconvenience would have been considerable. 
 

 

Agreed, you shouldn't have to do the repairs on a brand new loco, but since you've fixed it, there is no need to send it back. But certainly report it to the sellers, along with the photos.

Certainly I think that someone has got at it, before it came into your possession. Whether anyone will admit anything, is another story. 

[Clive martin]

I recently purchased a brand new oxford rail j27 ,i was very pleased with my purchase until i gave it a test run it was stalling on curves and derailing on pointwork,on closer inspection i discovered the pick ups had been fitted so badly the loco did not stand a chance of working properly it was quite a simple job to correct and now the loco runs very well ,but i still think i should not have to have repaired a brand new model !

[Captain Kernow]

On 03/05/2023 at 04:16, The Johnster said:

I use electrical contact cleaner in a rattlecan

Can you advise which make of cleaner you use, please Mr Johnster?

 

Thanks.

 

[34theletterbetweenB&D]

On 01/05/2023 at 18:51, DickBrowne said:

I’ve added a few pics to illustrate what I found inside - the fibres, the over-greased gearbox and the sludge. 
 

On the upside, it’s running like a champ now!

 

Has anybody else seen this kind of thing? Was I just unfortunate? I’ve bought a number of locos in my time and never seen one this bad before. 

As a fellow techy who started his career in the pure laboratory atmosphere of instrumental technique for materials analysis and characterisation; 'the shock' came via a subsequent  stint in manufacturing engineering development.

 

Yes! I have seen this kind of thing. The people employed in assembly operations will be very varied, some both dextrous and attentive to instructions, some 'not so much'. Then there's the little matter of all the assembly equipment being available in sound operational condition. The difficulties of those charged with managing such operations are the same globally based on my experiences: never sufficient of the ideal employees, who have to be placed on the most critical operations in order to deliver the required standard at volume, and that's with all the kit in good working order.

 

Your mechanism assembly operative possibly wearing a loose weave item of clothing, and apt to just splodge the lubricant in? Or it may be that the proper dispenser was broken or lost, and they were improvising, and fibre from the textile factory nearby was still blowing around after yesterday's storm, with several window panes still to be replaced...

[westernviscount]

3 hours ago, Captain Kernow said:

Can you advise which make of cleaner you use, please Mr Johnster?

 

Thanks.

 

Hi Cap,

 

I know you asked the Johnster but I use WD40 contact cleaner. As Johnster rightly says not to be confused with normal wd40. 

Edited August 19, 2023 by westernviscount

[woodenhead]

I've recently been using the WD40 Contact Cleaner, a revelation.

[woodenhead]

I've recently been looking at this and this video was recommended, I've saved it at the pertinent part relating to WD40 Contact Cleaner but it talks about the different methods and the impact on conductivity, track and plastics etc.

 

 

[The Johnster]

I am apparently not alone in using WD40 brand contact cleaner, as per Western Viscount's picture.  There are cheaper alternatives but this one is worth paying the extra for.  A can lasts me about a year.  I didn't specify the fact that I use WD40 contact cleaner in my 3rd May post because I wanted to stress the point that WD40, the stuff you spray on your car engine to get it to start on cold damp morning, a moisture repellant, is not suitable for use on models, and even if it doesn't eat the plastic will not achieve anything at all.  Confusing WD40 with WD40 contact cleaner is not a good idea.

[Nearholmer]

This tale has many resonances with what happened c20 years ago in the earlier days of the revival in British-outline coarse-scale 0 gauge (for those who didn’t know there’d been such a revival: there has, and the past c25 years has seen a huge number of products come to market in this format).

 

The firms involved, Ace Trains and Darstaed, were in the forefront of commissioning parts from far-east factories and arranging assembly in the far east, and they really struggled to maintain quality control around assembly. One of the problems this led to was the use of inappropriate grease, in inappropriate quantities, in mechanisms, in some cases causing severe damage when locos were run, in other simply compromising performance. The problems of QC were eventually solved, but only after a lot of acrimony and grief, and I suspect some ‘burnt fingers’ financially.

 

What I find slightly surprising is that after what is now a long time of British firms sourcing from the far east, one of the big firms (coarse-0 is a tiny niche compared with 00) still gets hit by this sort of thing. It makes one wonder whether they are sufficiently ‘on top of the job’.

 

Passing thought: these weren’t assembled at the height of the pandemic were they? I wonder if the British firm lost grip a bit then, or whether things were awry where they were assembled.

 

 

 

 

[ejstubbs]

22 hours ago, woodenhead said:

I've recently been looking at this and this video was recommended, I've saved it at the pertinent part relating to WD40 Contact Cleaner

 

Hang on a minute: the guy in the video spends a lot of time saying that polar products like isopropanol are bad, then recommends WD40 Contact Cleaner?  But WD40 Contact Cleaner does actually contain isopropanol/isopropyl alcohol/IPA/propan-2-ol or whatever other name you choose to call it by.  It says so in the Material Safety Data Sheet: https://sichdatonline.chemical-check.de/Dokumente/3275/EUF-0057_0010_01-11-2021_EN.pdf and in the ingredients list: https://media.wd40.co.uk/app/uploads/2020/11/20152622/EUF0057-IDS.pdf (both direct links from the WD40.co.uk web site).  The SDS on the WD40.com web site says that IPA is 10-20% of the composition, with hexane - which is non-polar - being the other active ingredient at between 20-30% of the mix (the 1,1-Diflouroethane is the propellant).  So you could have a 50-50 mix of polar and non-polar cleaning agents spurting out of the "smart straw" of your WD40 Contact Cleaner.  Hmm.

 

There is a view that the 'science' of polar vs non-polar substances being propounded in that video is, at best, irrelevant to model railway track cleaning for all practical purposes.  As he says himself in the video, water is a polar solvent.  There's usually plenty of water vapour in the air, so model railway track is being exposed to a polar solvent pretty much all of the time.  A bit of IPA now and then very likely makes diddly-squat difference.

 

The product he's actually pushing in the video, NO-OX-ID, is quite a different beast though, being a contact grease.  It may be a good product for the purpose - in fact it may work better than all the other things that people have used over the years to clean their model railway tracks - but I suspect that the polar/non-polar thing is little more than a distraction.  Spending 20-odd minutes propounding what smells a lot like pseudo-science as being the cause of all our problems, ending with "but this product makes all that go away", sounds to me snake oil sales 101.  It would be a lot quicker just to say "we use this because we find it better than anything else we've ever used before, including all the stuff you've probably tried to use yourself" - in other words, asking the audience to trust their experience - and I would suggest it wold be more likely to be convincing than propounding a dubious 'scientific' argument, which if anything tends to undermine any trust which a healthily skeptical audience member might have in what they're being told.

[woodenhead]

@ejstubbs Ok, so what do you use?

 

I got that video recommended to me on a seperate topic about cleaning my locos and track, but I am not alone in seeing benefits from using WD40 Contact Cleaner.

 

Personally I wish I did not need to think about the track/wheel interface and it was all batteries, but in N thats not a simple option.

[melmerby]

Myself I dont have much of a problem with dirty track and any dirty areas get a quick wipe with IPA soaked pad and that does for another month or two.

 

Calling that stuff WD40 Contact Cleaner* is IMHO silly as most people associate WD40 with cars and difficult to start engines. It's almost become a generic for that type of product.

Far better would be to call it WD50 or suchlike to differentiate it.

 

* other brands of contact cleaners could be quite disasterous for track as they contain oily filming agents to lubricate switch contacts. (I've just used some for such a use)

 

[Torper]

I note that whatever he might say about WD40 Contact Ckeaner, the chap in the video cleans his own track with "mineral spirit", which I believe is more commonly known in the UK as white spirit.  It is of course cheap and plentiful.  Otherwise, I seem to recall a chart suggesting that the best of all track cleaners is kerosene so next time I have the central heating oil tank filled I'll see if I can get a bottleful.

 

I believe that WD40 is the name of the company which is presumably why they have to use it for their contact cleaner and other products.

 

DT

[micklner]

Sounds like Methalated Spirit dries clean on metal.

 

White Spirit aka Turps, will leave everything greasy to the touch.

Edited August 24, 2023 by micklner

[Colin_McLeod]

On 01/05/2023 at 18:51, DickBrowne said:

... there was a load of fibre wound around the axles, as if it had been run on a carpet, but I know that the engine had never been run, as it was brand new stock from a reputable retailer. 
 

Perhaps it had been a sample model  reviewed on You Tube !!  😉

[melmerby]

11 hours ago, Torper said:

I believe that WD40 is the name of the company which is presumably why they have to use it for their contact cleaner and other products.

Originally the Rocket Chemical Company and Water Displacement formula 40

Later changed their name to WD40

[melmerby]

9 hours ago, micklner said:

Sounds like Methalated Spirit dries clean on metal.

 

White Spirit aka Turps, will leave everything greasy to the touch.

Meths has a colourant it leaves behind.

Kerosene/paraffin is a definite no no as a cleaner. it will leave a greasy film.