Aristocraft class 66 lubrication

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Dodod driver

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Has anyone any suggestions about getting grease into Aristocraft class 66 gearboxes without removing the boxes from within the bogie chassis? Removal requires unsoldering some small inaccessible joints which I am loath to try.

Thanks

Dodod driver
 
Unless there is something on George Schreyer (girr.org) or Greg Elmassian's (elmassian.com) pages, then no, sorry.

PhilP
 
It is highly doubtful you would ever need to grease the gearboxes, they are sealed. If you want to, you would have to drill a hole in each gearbox, taking care not to get plastic inside (almost impossible), grease and plug the hole.

What is more important is to use a heavy oil (usually gear oil) on the exposed axles, to make sure they slide side to side easily.

If this is not done, you get worn axles and derailments:
prime_wear.JPG


I strongly suggest you read my page on the Aristo "prime mover", understanding the construction will answer many questions

Prime Mover Motor Blocks

Greg Elmassian web site on large scale trains and garden railroads, cigars, and computers
elmassian.com elmassian.com

Greg
 
Thank you very much for the helpful answers. I have a spare bogie which is very noisy, so making me think that lubrication is necessary. I have pulled a gearbox out of it and dismantled it. Mr Elmassian's page was extremely helpful. The dismantled box gave no clue of whether the original grease was still being effective, as there was so little of it. I now have the choice of running the loco, and risk a gearbox failure with no chance of spares, or drilling holes as you suggest.
If I pull the worm gear to one side, I can drill the gearbox casing from below and squirt in some LGB gear grease, without risk of drilling into the hear wheel teeth.. There is a risk of plastic debris entering the box as you point out.
 
Thank you. Since the wear on the drive shafts from the little ball bearing is minimal, I am going to assume that the loco has not run for many hours. It is the age of the grease that was causing me concern. If I could have found a way to inspect the grease and renew it easily, I would have done so. However, unsoldering the joints on the motor lugs has proved too difficult at present, so I cannot really proceed with dismantling. Before I drill holes in the gearboxes , I shall try another test run and see what the noise levels are and motor amps look like.

I am very grateful for your help and advice. For your information, I bought the loco secondhand some years ago. It quickly became apparent that one bogie was noisy, so I bought a brand-new bogie ( from Bachmann, I think??) and swapped it over. The original noisy bogie was then partially dismantled, to see if I could find the source of the noise. In doing so, I lost a spring and tiny ball bearing from one gearbox. I then snapped one of the thin metal "legs" which bring current up from the spring clip on the outside of the gearbox to the top of the bogie. By this time, I realised that these mechanisms were not designed to be maintained. I have extracted one gearbox from within the bogie, dismantled it and found very little if any grease and no wear on the axles from the little balls. I have drilled holes in it to see how best to proceed.
Regards,

Malcolm
 
Actually, if you see ANY wear on the axles from the "little ball bearing" the loco has been underlubricated... I have 20 year old Aristo locos with no such wear.

Yes, if you drill holes in the gearbox and use a coarse syringe to grease that can help, but it is very rare that these gearboxes ever need to be opened and lubricated.

More importantly, a drop of heavy gear oil on each end of each axle makes the most difference.

If you are solving what you think is a noisy gearbox, it is almost certainly the misalignment of one or more motors.

Greg
 
Greg Elmassian said:
Actually, if you see ANY wear on the axles from the "little ball bearing" the loco has been underlubricated... I have 20 year old Aristo locos with no such wear.

Yes, if you drill holes in the gearbox and use a coarse syringe to grease that can help, but it is very rare that these gearboxes ever need to be opened and lubricated.

More importantly, a drop of heavy gear oil on each end of each axle makes the most difference.

If you are solving what you think is a noisy gearbox, it is almost certainly the misalignment of one or more motors.

Greg
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Thank you, Greg. I shall try to oil the axles and then run the loco.

Regards

Malcolm.
 
Greg Elmassian said:
Are you going to try to realign the motors? Works 90% of the time when you have a noisy motor block. If you hear noise from a gearbox, normally the damage to the gears is already done.

Greg
Click to expand...
I have now run the loco for about an hour, without doing anything except grease the axle ends. It runs beautifully quietly. I think my concerns over lubrication because of the age of the grease may have been unfounded. Thank you for all your helpful advice.

I notice that the lights on the front and rear of the loco don't seem to show the colours that I was expecting. I am running it on an LGB MTS II system, set up for analogue i.e. the green and yellow LEDs are on on the central station, since the loco is not chipped for dcc. I shall switch to a MkIII central station and a Massoth Navigator, and see if the lights show the correct colours with that equipment.

Regards

Malcolm
 
Hello Malcolm,

What do you mean by 'correct colours'?

Are you aware there is a day/night running switch?
I also found the lighting patterns depended on which livery the loco was in. - This might have been due to a faulty main board?

PhilP
 
Don't run it on a DCC system without a decoder, it's not good for the motors. It's not true analogue DC but a "bent" DCC signal. In the small scales motors can fry rapidly and as such it's a practice that's been strongly advised against for many years.

The 66 has a microcontroller chip handling the lighting and day/night switching etc., it may be confused by the pseudo-DC. I found I had to bypass the chip and hard-wire the lights when I fitted a decoder to my 66. From my old notes about the DCC install:

it has been reported by others that after fitting a Digitrax decoder to the loco the lower head and tail lights do not change direction reliably (if at all) under either DC or DCC unless the motor circuit is switched off. My loco exhibited the same problem.
Investigation of the main circuit board shows that the lower light clusters are controlled by a PIC microcontroller chip, which (as far as I can tell) is intended to monitor the voltage polarity being fed to the motors and switch on or off the various head and tail lights accordingly. For the UK liveried models it also takes into account the night/day switch. Although this microcontroller driven arrangement works nicely on pure DC, it doesn’t appear to be able to sense the motor voltage properly once a decoder is inserted into the motor circuit.
Click to expand...
 
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Greg your comment:
"What is more important is to use a heavy oil (usually gear oil) on the exposed axles, to make sure they slide side to side easily."

What is your thinking behind this ?
I had assumed light oil would be the norm ?

Regards,
Joe
 
This is an area that needs to stay lubricated, and very few people would lubricate often enough to allow light oil. Light oil is for light loads, like valve gear that is decorative.

The heavy oil will stay in place longer and require less frequent lubrication. Realize that these axles move side to side very often.

Also, did you actually take in what the picture I posted implied? Clearly un-lubricated the internal ball can carve away a lot of metal... i.e. need a heavier bodied lube.

Good enough?

Greg
 
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