Repair

Disassembly: superstructure

Separating the superstructure from the frame was easy enough.

The front screw was missing anyway so I will have find a replacement. The rear screw was in plain sight and left its place soon enough.

This reveals this loco's old days construction: split frame.

The two frame halves are electrically insulated from each other and current is picked up directly from the driver wheels without wires or pick-ups.

All electric features like lamps, the smoke generator and the motor are connected to the frame halves with no or little wiring.

This construction method makes a model electrically very robust and reliable while it a relatively cheap construction method. The wheels are electrically insulated from each other by a plastic axle. The downside of this outdated approach is that is practically impossible to upgrade this model to DCC and/or fit a coreless motor.

Attempt at quartering

In a hunch I gave the rear two wheels a gentle (not too forceful) twist and wonder, oh wonder, they jumped into place, sort of.

That gave me the opportunity to test the running of the loco. So I connected the two frame halves and gave it a whir:

Well, noisy but other than that not too bad.

Initially it ran hesitant but the longer it ran the more freely it moved. This engine has been sitting somewhere for a loooooong time. But this apparent success turned into disappointment: as soon as I put it on its wheels it got knock knees again. Apparently the wheels were loose on the axles, very loose indeed.

Disassembly: frames

Next to do was to separate the bottom plate, that holds the driving wheels in place, from the frames. I removed the two obvious screws in the very bottom of the plate but the bottom plate would not come off as expected.

Well, this is what the manuals do not tell you. After all, this is well beyond normal maintenance. My guess is that this bottom plate would come away for the first time since the loco left the factory. I found a video of a modeller who had the bottom off but he did not show how.

I was stuck for a few hours. There were no other screws that I could see. I had already fiddled with the outer ends a bit, but I didn't dare to jiggle it too much for fear of breaking the 40-year-old plastic.

I saw that the bottom plate was stuck under a lip of the metal frame in the places marked with yellow arrows.

So I put my thumbs on the screw holes and with my index fingers I gently lifted the outer ends of the plastic up. Without further resistance the frame popped out.

This revealed the real cause of all problems

All three white axles were cracked.

This made the wheels to sit loose on their axles. They would go out of quarter as soon as any amount of force was exerted on them.

Disassembly: motion gear

Basically I had now arrived at the point were I could repair the locomotive by turning a few new plastic axles and put it all back together again. But I also wanted to improve the loco's appearance by turning the wheel flanges to RP25 norm. So I continued the disassembly to the bare wheels.

Getting the crankpin of the main driver off proved to by a headache. I simply could not get the hex screw to move. Until I realised there was a C-ring holding it all together.

I pried the C-ring out with a small screwdriver.

I lifted all the wheels out.

As the frame halves were relatively polluted with grease and dirt I separated them and took them for clean.

The main driving gear featured springs. That is an interesting solution to dampen the shock effect of the motor to the drivers vice versa.

I removed the crankpins with my tapered tweezers.

Gently, gently I pried the tweezers under the crankpin head. Thankfully there was enough room under the crankpin head to get a start. I then levered the the crankpin head up a little, moved the tweezers forward and repeated the process until the crankpin let go.

All parts of the wheelsets, one side already disassembled and cleaned

And of course Murphy had a say in this as well. "If you lift crankpins, the last one will break". It did. Murphy is always right. The crankpin head sheared off. I jumped behind my lathe and quickly enough I had a replacement.

Actual repair: axles