Here’s another model that commonly has a manufacturing flaw, the Lilliput FLIRT EMU in N gauge. As others have found, mine would operate very nicely for a few minutes then, when you want to reverse the direction, it just locked up and wouldn’t go anywhere. Apparently this is a flaw in the motors, and as this model has 2 motors, the chances of getting the problem are doubled. 

I put the model aside for some years and only recently got round to looking at it again. 

I first considered the remotoring kit from SB Modelbau, which comes with new worm gears and flywheels already fitted to the new coreless motors. I’ve done 6 Minitrix Re4/4”s with their kits and I’m very pleased with the results. However, the kit for the FLIRT requires some milling of the chassis, which I have no skill at, and their web site doesn’t say exactly what that milling involves. 

I asked James Dewar (who restored my Arnold Rbe540 railcar - see my earlier post) about possible solutions and he recommended another kit from DM Toys. This one is cheaper and requires no alteration to the chassis but you do have to remove the worm gears from the old motors and fit them to the new ones. Also, you lose the flywheel drive with this conversion. 

I decided to try the kit from DM Toys and I’m happy with the result, despite my clumsy workmanship. Here are some points to watch out for if you decide to try it yourself.

First, if you don’t have experience getting a worm gear off a motor and fitting it to a new one, please do your homework and don’t rush into it. This was my first attempt and I got away with it but only just. The instructions with the kit are almost silent on the subject so you’ll need to search online or talk to an expert.

Next, the plastic shells that fit around the motor to keep it snug in the chassis pocket. These are necessary because the new motors are smaller and a different shape to the old ones. There are 2 pieces per motor and you need to think carefully before you attach them. The instructions with the kit provide little detail but I discovered 2 important considerations. 

One is to make sure the base of the motor sits on the chassis floor, otherwise the worm gear will sit too high and not mesh correctly with the bogie. I had to file away some of the plastic shells to make this possible as I had already glued them so the halves met underneath the motors. 

The other consideration is to make sure the motor is held in the right place fore-and-aft for the worm gear to sit over the bogie centre. If, like me, you didn’t get the worm on as far as you’d like, you will have to sit the motor further back in the pocket, which affects how you place the motor into the shells. See photo showing how I placed the motor into the shells to achieve this - it’s different to the photo in the instructions. Once I was happy that I had this right (test and test again) I also glued the entire thing into the chassis pocket to prevent any further movement. 
 

With the job done and the train reassembled I was slightly disappointed at how noisy it now was, and low speed acceleration was not quite smooth. After some checking, I concluded that this was most likely chatter from the Zimo MX616 decoder. Zimo has a fine tuning parameter at CV56 and recommends a value of 133 for small coreless motors. This sorted the noise and smoothed out the acceleration, so I’m now happy with the conversion and absolutely chuffed to have the FLIRT in service at long last.