On30 Climax

 For the locomotives in my collection that are normally not on the layout, I take them out of their boxes and give a run at least once every six months or so. I do this to keep the mechanisms freed up and to hopefully prevent any "lack of use" issues down the road. For my On30 locos, this usually isn't a problem as there are a sufficient number of train shows in a given year that they are run on the modular layout of the On30 group that I am a member of. I was on vacation at the time of the last show and then we had a winter break followed by the pandemic, so in total its been approx. 18 moths since the last show that I was a part of.  That being said, it was time to dig them out and give them a run on my small On30 home layout. The Bachmann Climax ( factory Soundtraxx Tsunami equipped) was one of the first On30 locomotives that I purchased probably about 10-11 years ago and although it ran well for the first couple of years, it did eventually suffer from the notorious Bachmann split gear issue. After enough complaining from buyers, Bachmann came out with a program whereby you could contact them and they would send you new sets of gears for any On30 locos that you had in your possession free of charge. That was back around 2015 I believe and I don't think it is in place anymore. I received the new gears and they were tucked away for when I had time to do the replacement - well that end up being about 3 years before I got around to it. Bachmann provided instructions and there were plenty of users who documented the replacement with pictures and posted on the internet. The most common problematic gears were the bevel gears located inside the trucks of the climax - so a relatively easy swap out. When Bachmann sent me the new gears, they sent me everything including a gear replacement set for the gear box as well as the entire drivetrain. After doing the gear replacement, for the trucks, the model ran better but still had a slight growl to it when running ( which you couldn't hear when the sound was on by the way) so, I made the faithful decisions that I would also do the gear box as well, even though I was unsure if there was anything wrong with those gears but assumed that this was the source of the growl. When I disassembled the gear box, it came to a point where all the bell cranks and "moving parts " located under the boiler basically fell out in a pile in my hands. To make a long story short, over the course of the next year or so, I attempted several times to reassemble the model and on several frustrating occasions came to the conclusion that the model would end up regulated to a display shelf, however after stepping back and waiting a couple of months between tries, I was finally able to get everything back together. The end result is the model still has a slight growl heard when the sound is turned off, but slightly better after replacing the gear box gears and using a new high quality gear lubrication. I used JMRI decoder pro to tweak some of the advanced Tsunami "Hyperdrive" CV's and am now pleased with how the model runs. Here she is on my home On30 layout. Till next time....

Bachmann On30 Climax

About to cross over the level crossing