I had two Forneys, one a lot noisier than the other.  One required a start voltage setting of 10 to even get going.  So I moved the motor from the quieter one to the worst one and it calmed down enough for me to feel comfortable selling it.

For the donor Forney, I ordered a NWSL motor and worm gear.  I found it impossible to remove the OEM worm.  It was affixed so tightly that I bent the steel plate in my NWSL Puller trying to remove it.  I finally broke part of a tooth off the gear, trying to get it off.

When I tried to buy a replacement motor from Bachmann, I was told the cost was $170!!!!!!  I assume that was because the motor was not available without buying a new frame.  Hell, you buy an entire new loco online for $125.

Anyways, I had to experiment a LOT to get the NWSL gear to mesh quietly with the OEM driven gear.  It wound up being just barely in touch with the driven gear, totally opposite of how gears  should be set up.  It isn't totally quiet but it is better than it was.

I have two of these and one runs relatively quietly, the other is quite noisy.  Enough so that it can be heard over the sound of the sound decoder. 

I've pulled the bottom cover off and applied a small touch of plastic-compatible gear lube, Labelle 106, to all three gears, with no reduction in the noise.  It has had very little run time, probably less than an hour, but as loud as it is, I can't see that more break-in time is going to change things.

Short of sending it to Bachmann to repair, is there anything more that I can do?  I am very hesitant to return it as I have cut off the Forney coal bunker and removed the trailing truck, added an after-market tender, hard-wired the sound decoder after removing the Bachmann supplemental boards, and hard-wired the tender to the loco.

Any help will be appreciated.

Scott Groff

I should add something about the Bachmann wiring.  Don't rely on their color coding.  Get a multimeter and set it for continuity checking.

Place the loco on a length of rail, and keep probing wire ends to determine which is right rail (red), which is left (black).  One probe goes on the right rail and the other on one of the wire ends until you get a beep.  Repeat for the left rail.

Next, get a 9-volt battery and note which terminal is positive.  Now that you have eliminated the two wires that are the track pickup, pick two more that might be motor power and keep probing with a set of test leads to find out first which are the motor leads, and which is the positive (orange) lead.  The positive orientation will result in the loco jumping forward.  You can change this is you get it wrong with CV29 but then the direction of headlight operation will be wrong.

Finally, get a1.5 volt battery and probe the remaining wires for headlights.  Bachmann uses LEDs which are polarity sensitive.  Again, find the positive side of the battery and with test leads, keep probing until you get the headlights lit.  DON'T use anything greater than 1.5 volts or you'll blow out the LEDs.  You can replace the LEDs but it isn't a lot of fun.  I replaced all of mine as I didn't like the very orange glow.  More like a camp fire than a headlight.

Scott Groff

If your loco is like mine, all the wire positions are marked on the UNDERSIDE of the Soundtraxx board.  All the wires are marked for color code, including two for Blue so you can land the common blue wire for front and read headlights separately.

Now for the heresy part:  I eliminated the Bachmann board entirely.  It is only there to accommodate European wiring requirements, and to give the ability to simply plug in the sound board.

As to soldering to the sound board, place a tiny bit of flux on the bared wire to be soldered to its tab, and onto the tab, and using a small solder tip with a drop of solder on the end, just touch it to the end of the wire as it protrudes through the little hole.  Make sure you are using non-acid flux and solder.

Scott Groff

You would be better off ordering a pack of the several types of brake wheels the Grandt Lines sells, and getting a length of brass or music wire from your local hobby shop or big box retailer.  A good size would be .025," or 1" in the prototype size.  The Grandt Line brake wheels are very highly detailed and because of the choice of style they offer, you can different brake wheels on your cars.

Scott Groff

I have an 0-4-2 purchased several years ago for which I am in the process of adapting a Backwoods Miniatures 4-wheel tender.  The kit was designed for the 0-4-0, but I have found that the tender sits unacceptably higher than the floor of the 0-4-2.  Is there a difference in wheel sizes between the 0-4-0 and 0-4-2?

Scott Groff

I tried my suggestion of using .008" phosphor bronze wire pickup on the trailing truck and I couldn't make it work reliably.  Either one side or the other did not have continuity from the rail to the pickup wire, or the wheel set skidded along the rail when I had the pickup wires positioned for good continuity.  And that was after adding lead weight to the trailing truck frame.  Good idea - bad execution!

I tried my suggestion of using .008" phosphor bronze wire pickup on the trailing truck and I couldn't make it work reliably.  Either one side or the other did not have continuity from the rail to the pickup wire, or the wheel set skidded along the rail when I had the pickup wires positioned for good continuity.  And that was after adding lead weight to the trailing truck frame.  Good idea - bad follow through.

I've been wondering about the same issue and here's what I plan to do:

1. Glue .008" nickel silver wire on each of the two arms supporting the trailing wheel set so that they rub against the back of each trailing wheel.  I checked - there is no electrical continuity between the wheels.

2.  Solder some very flexible wire to each of the NS power pick-up's.

3.  Thread red and black wire from the NS pickups to your decoder connection point for power pickup.  Will need to bore a small hole through the cab floor.

4.  Possibly have to weight the axle of the trailing truck to overcome any additional swing resistance.  If so, loosely wrap a number of turns of thin solder around the axle, like a coiled spring.

I hard-wire all my decoders so that's my plan.  I don't know where the OEM decoder is mounted but mine will go against one cab side wall.  Since all my locos are sound-equipped, I still have to find a good location for the speaker.  It will probably wind up being disguised as a bench for the engineer to sit on.

Lastly, your Electrofrog would probably benefit from having track power routed to an isolated frog.  Then control that with a wired slide switch that also throws your track switch, or buy one of the $60 power routing electronic switches from Tam Valley Depot that will handle up to 6 of these.  Pretty neat device.Scott G.

I used a LokSound 3.5 decoder (full-size) because they had a pre-programmed sound for a side-rod Diesel, where you can hear the clanking.  The advantage of the LokSound is that there is no capacitor to try to locate, and the decoder is thinner than the Tsunami.  No need to spend the extra dollars for a mini-version.

Anyways, that decoder's speaker is a good fit when affixed to the inside of the radiator grille.  There is sufficient room to glue the decoder above the motor against the shell.  I drilled/cut out the plastic grille and replaced it with brass screen wire from Clover House.  No need for a sound box as the shell accomplishes that.  Sound goes out the front, back pressure goes out the bottom through the drivers.

As sound installations go, this was a simple one with good room.

I decided to remove the drivers, one at a time, to check for wobble. In doing so, I
found that all three screws on the driver bottom plate were loose, thus not
clamping the drivers securely in place.

With the drivers not secured in their bearing slots, the main and side rods
would torque the axles a little up and down in the bearing slots. I put the
loco upside down in a foam cradle and ran power to both sides of the trailing
truck. I could immediately see the problem.

With the first axle out and checked, it showed a minor amount of
non-eccentricity but not really bad. So I reassembled things.

BTW, the nuts that secure the rods do not match 000, 00, 0, 1 or 2 nut drivers.
They must be metric, so I had to use my metric pliers to remove/replace them.

Now with the loco reassembled and axles secured, the loco not only runs better
but much of the gear noise is gone. The motion down the track is kind of like
what you see when a real steam loco kind of "hunts" its way side to side down
the track. There's not enough that I want to go further trying to fix driver
wobble.

I also found that two of the four sand lines were rubbing on the rear driver while operating in reverse.  Cutting them loose from where they were glued in cured the problem on one side and some CA glue solved the one on the other side.

I considered sending the loco to Bachmann to fix but I have spent some time altering the loco: added the included coal to make the plastic coal load disappear: added a backup light and carved both of the B lamps to look like A's; added an engineer; added front and rear brake hoses; and removed both Bachmann PC boards, at the same time as re-doing the tenuous wire connections to the Soundtraxx board. What prompted  that was that I found the blue common wire loose and the white wire hanging on by one strand.  No wonder the headlight didn't work.

Past experience with Bachmann in HO scale is that they will replace the loco
with this kind of problem rather than spend the time fixing it. I really didn't
want to redo all this on a new loco.

This has been quite the adventure.

I've had this loco a couple of years in the box, never run.  When I finally got some layout wiring done, I pulled the loco out to run it on a test track.  The headlight did not work, so I started checking continuity and all was good except for the connection from where the blue and yellow wires terminate on the side of the Bachmann board  to the 8-pin plug.  On opening the tender, a number of very small parts fell out, looking suspiciously like surface mount resistors.  They might explain the dead headlight.

Having done a bunch of hard-wire DCC installs in HO, I decided to remove the Bachmann boards and wire the Soundtraxx decoder to the OEM wiring harness.  Now the headlight works.

In testing the final assembly on a set of rollers, I noticed that the tender "jacks" up and down (an oscillation) with each rotation of the drivers.

Folks on the On30 Conspiracy Group suggested that the drivers are possibly out of round, mounted improperly on the axles, or the axles are bent.

I really don't want to send this to Bachmann to fix so can I buy a set of drivers for this loco? Sorry for the long-winded intro.

Scott Groff

When it comes to the Davenport, an ESU micro fits under the engine hood with the speaker making the right noise through where the fake plastic mesh was in the grill area until it is cut out and replaced with fine brass mesh. Then you can download any sound you require - I am still using their Caterpillar sound file, sounds good.

FWIW, ESU has a sounds available for a German side-rod Diesel that is pretty cool.  You really can hear them and to take maximum advantage, you have to run the critter rather slowly.  Unfortunately, it is not a gas engine.

Scott Groff
Puyallup, WA