wheels lose pick-up


C

ClintOHenry

New Member
I bought a Walthers GP9 that has almost no run time on it. It has the "shiniest" wheels I have ever seen. It will travel nicely on my dcc track then lose contact. A very slight push and it's back running. None of my other locos, most older, have this same trouble. Is it the wheels of the Walthers? Any suggestions?
 
Did you clean the wheels? Even straight from the factory sometimes they have a light coating of something on them.
 
It could be a number of things. It might be dirty wheels, but I take it you would be hard pressed to agree if they are shiny. It might be a wiper that isn't making contact, and that could be due to mechanical 'miss' or corrosion or dirt. It may be an intermittent contact due to a broken solder or wire. It could be a faulty intermittent component of the board/decoder. It could be the power supply, or it could be fault contacts with joiners.
 
is this an older bluebox design or their newer release? for the older engines thay have a wiper pickup system in the engine, a hook flat blade connected to the trucks then a long blade attached to the motor touches those truck blades, they do fine if clean, but over time I'm sure they rustify, but I always hard wire these. For newer engines look for pickup wipers on the trucks if they do, and bend them slightly harder towards the wheel for better pressure. (with the wheel off) then make sure the wipers fit properly when the wheel is reset.
Make sure any other contacts these wipers make is clean, but again, if these are issues, hard wire them.
Believe it or nuts I will use Rail-Zip on these wiper contacts to help maintain the contacts.

I'll put rail-zip on the wheel journal axles also.

I would also take your engine and just run it and run it for a while on a loop, its what you call a wear in, for parts to "wear" into each other better, manufacturing might not be perfect smooth, but just the running will smooth out and polish surfaces and help contacts.
 
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Wahl Hair Clipper oil, if applied LIGHTLY, to various metal surfaces with clean and improve conductivity. (Yeah, others will disagree, and too much can attract dirt, but it does cut arcing and sparking, which leads to reduced conductivity.)
 
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