Engine Repair

May 24, 2013

As mentioned in the article on battery charging, a ride on train was recently purchased a charity shop but it was not working.

There were a few faults with it:

• The main power switch was not working. It was a two pole two throw switch and when I test it the other throw was working correcty. So the switch was rotated 180° and the connectors swapped to the other throw.
• The reversing lever was also not working, this turned out to be a simple case of it being over cranked. It had been pushed beyond it’s limits and hence was flopping about not touching the switch. This was re-aligned and I checked it was working before re-assembly.
• One of the sound switches was not working. These are little push buttons soldered onto the PCB and I’ve no suitable replacements. I decided to leave this not working rather than attempt to fix. This has turned out just to be tempremental as it was working a couple of times when testing.
• The bumpers were just stickers and those had been worn so I removed them and replaced those with some plastic and aluminium. The aluminium was part of old computer hard disks and the platic was from my old shreader which I disassembled when it broke. The plastic was sawn into squares which were drilled and screwed onto a wooden disk on my lathe faceplate. I then used a parting off tool to cut a circle in the plastic. The bumpers were glued on using a builders grab adhesive.

The repairs pretty much required the whole train to be disassembled to analyse and fix the issues. Because this is quite involved I wrote up the instructions on ifixit.

Once it stops raining I’ll give it a test outside on it’s tracks. In the mean time here’s a quick snippet of it being tested inside.

By Andy from Workshopshed One Comment

  Posted in: Repairs Tags: Electric Motors, toy, train