Help with 25 year old hornby diesel

R.046 is a lever switch.

Class E3046 is an electric locomotive with overhead pick ups. If you have one of these I am willing to offer you as much as £5 for it.This is a huge sum for such an old locomotive. Take my word for it. I will even pay the postage :o)

(kim)

Take no notice of Kim. A class 30 is of very little value in the market place. There are just too many of them about.

However, as long as it is a very old class 30, I'm ready to go up to as much as £6, even without the lever switch, as you seem like a nice chap. And that's doing you a favour, squire.

You can trust me, I am an accountant.

Cheers, Steve

You want advice, but can't be bothered to even get the model number or loco class correct.

"pepegalego" wrote

You seem to have a foul mouth and be totally lacking of a sense of humour though, hardly likely to encourage people to help you in the future.

John.

IIRC, Hornby used an integrated motor bogie on these older locos: the motor frame is also the frame of the bogie. If that's what you are referring to as the "motor assembly", you can't convert to DCC easily, since the motor must be completely isolated from the frame and any power pickups. The decoder picks up the power as well as the control signals, and sends the power to the motor (and headlights, etc, if any.) A conversion would require not only disassembly but also redesign of the bogie, which would entail major and probably tricky machining to enable the motor to be isolated from the wheels and electrical pickup. You might be able to fit a modern DCC-ready power bogie, assuming you can find one with the correct wheel base so that you could re-use the sideframes of the old bogie. In any case, the project requires skills I suspect you don't have, since if you had them, you would have figured out how to disassemble the "motor assembly", in which case you wouldn't have needed to ask for help here. And you would also have recognised the redesign and machining problems facing you.

My suggestion is: clean it up, make a nice little base for it out of a piece of track and a piece of nicely stained wood, maybe add an engraved brass plate (relatively cheap at a sports trophy shop), and display it in an acrylic display box on your mantel, where all can see and admire it.

HTH

That is absolutely no problem to achieve. The brushes are mounted on a plastic brush holder/magnet holder and grounding to the frame is either through the brush spring to the frame or through an edge on the pressed phosphor-bronze wheel wiper/current conductor assembly (plus the brush tension spring) Triang/Hornby used an insulating sleeve on one end of the brush tension spring to insulate one brush from the frame, so an additional insulating sleeve will achieve total isolation from the frame on older locos. For those motor bogies with the integrated wipers/conducting strip, the brush resting point needs gentle trimming back, along with the additional brush spring insulating sleeve.

A quick snip with end cutters and a tidy with a recangular needle file will do the job neatly.

The old Triang/Hornby motor bogies are a small step forward from blacksmith technology in overall design, but incorporate a high quality (for 1950s/60s) armature and magnet. If the axle bearings are not worn to the point where the gears no longer mesh and if the magnet is remagnetized if neccessary, these mechanisims will give good service and are excellent for learning on as they are particularly robust. The coarse wheels are their worst feature, but there are or have been replacement sets offered by other firms.

Regards, Greg.P.

Thanks for the reply. It seems I am going to have to take HTH's advice. It is just not going to be worth the effort. I would have loved to have seen it running with my newer locos. It will have to sit on a siding and be revered by all the passengers on my Northern Express.

As HTH has pointed out, the integrated motor bogie on these older locos is undoubtbly the problem. I hooked it up correctly to the decoder but whenever I wanted to put it on the track, I immediately got a short circuit. That was the point of wanting to get at the motor.

Thanks again for all the information.

Greg Procter wrote: [...]

Thanks for this, my memory was a)hazy, and b) pre-Triang.