#31 rejoins the fleet!

Since I had been thrown a curve with the Life-Like 0-4-0 yesterday and since I discovered I had another DSD090 decoder I decided to replace the decoder in #31 the 4-6-0 assigned to Thorny Point yard.

Two hours later and the new decoder was installed and ready for testing. So I got out my test track and my NCE system and placed #31 on the test track. The sound decoder sprang to life. Go so far! I addressed the loco and gave it some throttle. The chuff rate started but the loco did NOT move! It wasn't the decoder! Great!

Out came the volt meters and I started tracing the wiring. Now the plugs on these things are TINY and getting probes into them is NOT easy. I did determine that one of the pickup wires from the engine was not conducting to the tender but that should not be causing my problem. I found a bad solder connection in the tender and fixed it. This problem went away but NOT the original one.

Off comes the boiler. (I also mistakenly removed the cab and that took about an hour to get back on.) I traced all of the wires and everything seemed OK? So I reconnected the tender and gave it a try. The loco MOVED! Fixed! Back on goes the boiler and another try. NOTHING!?

Back off comes the boiler. It must be the plug but I don't see anything. I try placing some insulation tape on top of the plug and try again. Again the engine works fine without the boiler but NOT with it.

Off comes the boiler again. (I don't know how many times I took it off during this process.) But this time the engine did NOT run with the boiler off. We are making progress, though it doesn't seem so.

While I was playing around with the boilerless engine it started to move. What did I do? I finally noticed than when I moved the motor a certain way it would start to move. It was then I noticed one of the motor leads had broken at the connection to the brushes. (The lead is taped in place so it was not apparent it had broken since it still looked connected to the motor.) A quick re-solder and now everything is working fine without and WITH the boiler, over five hours after starting this process!

It seems the boiler was putting enough pressure on the motor to cause the broken connection to separate.

I have now programmed the new decoder to the old decoder settings and #31 is ready for service. I am planning on installing a cam so I still have that to do but hopefully that will not take five hours!