I can tell you from experience that these critters originally came with a HUGE chunk of lead over the front drivers, easily twice as large as what you replaced it with, if not triple the size. Very resourceful repair job! Seeing this thing do a wheelie was hillarious
I have this exact engine - same B&O #25 livery and all - that I got probably about 25 years ago when I was a kid. It always ran quite well for me and never gave me any issues, even with all the crashes and heavy usage it got - including a back-to-back pulling contest with a diesel. I haven't run it, or any of my other packed-away HO stuff, for several years, but I always remember it fondly. Imagine my surprise then to see this video reporting it as one of the worst locomotives made, an notoriously unreliable and quite easily broken! I'm shocked to hear how bad they tended to be, but very happy to see you managed to repair this one. I'll have to dig my HO track out of storage and hope my old transformer still works so I can give my B&O #25 some more running. I don't know how I managed to get apparently the one singular build of this engine that worked very well, but I'm sure glad I did. I would have been heartbroken as a child if my only steam engine ended up tearing itself apart. You're quite right about the weight, by the way. It's supposed to have a quite massive and heavy chunk of metal that fills up most of the front of the saddle tanks. It's a heavy little engine with that in there.
Ok I know I posted a comment on another of your videos saying that it was my favorite I've seen so far, but please note, I hadn't seen this one! Now this is my favorite! Thanks for sharing! Keep going! I was almost falling from my chair when the loco was "popping wheelies"! Great fun! And you fixed it well.
Another great smt video! Thanks for pushing out the great content! Your channel is the reason why I got back into the hobby during the pandemic and why I started going back to train shows! Keep up the good work
You should absolutely think about getting a cheap 3D printer to print gears like the the ones you need! Would be a slightly less satisfying and durable solution, but would be an easy fix for issues like this.
@@Scraghunter I was going to recommend getting a resin 3D printer and using some of the "ABS Like" resin. Another option would be to mold the gear with a silicone mold and then do an epoxy resin pour. Sure it won't be the last time that gear will be needed.
@@SMTMainline check your library system or if you have a maker space . I think an fdm printer would be able to print good gears. A resin sla one has incredible precision but higher maintenance requirements. Strength would be a concern but I think it would be good enough either way As a bonus most CAD packages have gear macros. Hope it works for you.
Very impressive to see an old locomotive brought back to life and the tweaks you made to it to get it to run better. Excellent vid and please keep them coming!
You certainly don't believe in making things easy for yourself! But, it's so good to see your success! That steam loco doing a wheely was something else! Go B&O, Go!
Very nice job Harrison, usually a worn out plastic gear is a death sentence for an old loco! BTW, North West Short Line didn't disappear. They were sold and moved to Montana. They have a new and much better website.
@@SMTMainline I haven't ordered from the new NWSL but did order from them previously. I got re-gear kits for the Proto 1000 RDC. The only catch was that they were produced in batches so I had to wait a while until NWSL had enough orders to run a batch of the kits. I'm not sure if the policy is the same under the new owner. The prices have gone up a lot in the last couple of years but if it means restoring a brass model to operation NWSL is the only game in town.
I really admire your perseverance, getting this little tea-kettle running again! I wish Life Like (or whoever has the body molds, etc.,) might offer one with an up-to-date drive system.
We had the exact same one since 1987. It was allways a favorite because it ran the fastest of all our locomotives and I thought it was very reliable. It was retired some time in 1995 though - we still have it but I haven't tested any of the trains since years.
I about died from laughter when it popped wheelies.😂😂😂 I'm 70 years old and a lifelong model railroader and in all my years I've never seen a wheel popping locomotive. Maybe you should set up two tracks side by side and have the first ever locomotive drag race.😂 You might start a new You Tube trend.
I recently got back into model railways after a 30 year break, lol. Just picked up a box of stuff at a swap meet and this little loco was in it. Runs great, but the headlight isn't working....yet. I'm from Scotland, and I have a couple of sets of the Intercity 125 you did a video on. I'll comment on that video soon. Great videos by the way.
Very cool little locomotive Harrison! That UP boxcar is very nice, too, got a similar type of car except its a weathered Frisco model! Nice work as always!
It is nice Randall I agree man. I never owned any athearn genesis stuff in my collection maybe I will like a used Union Pacific sd70m. The only athearn collections I have is ready to roll and the blue boxes.
I've worked on a lot of those Teakettles too. And back in the late 1980s I had one with the weight missing, as well as the headlight, smokestack and smokebox door. But it ran well. Using bits from my spare parts, I added the smokebox door and a headlight, with a smokestack made from a pen. But no weight. I soon discovered that it could "pop a wheelie" and after cutting the coupler box off, I found I could run as normal, but control the wheelies with the throttle, even getting it to go back on 4 wheels with a quick reduction of speed. The slots in the rear of the body match the rail gauge and even allowed the loco to do a wheelie around curves. The only thing that made it derail was wheelies over switches. I still have it today, and it still runs. But it spends most of its time now on a non-working display of track that I made as a joke. complete with jump ramp and loop-the-loop (no, not the old Tyco Turbo Train). Anyway, here's a photo of it taken in 2005. www.hobbiesplus.com.au/x%20067.jpg
The gears get stripped from switching from forward to reverse before emgine comes to a stop. Lifelike is junk. In the day, I had a dockside engine that lasted one day before it stripped gears. They were poor slow speed runners too. My AHM engines were much better but they cost more. You got what you paid for. Good save!
I remember mine being quite a workhorse! After many scale miles of track the lightbulb managed to MELT the faceplate off. Doesn’t help I remember running it exclusively on full tilt.
I had one of these when I was little.. took it apart for some reason and it never quite made it back together. I still have the parts tucked away in a closet in my parents house though lol. Hopefully someday I’ll have room to build a layout and run my trains again. Also, I do remember the lead weight being pretty big, like it fills the whole space that’s not occupied by the motor and gears.
for replacement gears ive heard you can find just random gear bags that contain a lot of common gear varieties you can repurpose and for rare gears you can take a mostly intact sample and make a mold to make resin copies, 3d printing may also work for some. my typical stuff to mess with is video game tech and plastic parts such as gears are a surprisingly common issue to run into with some of them having been unobtanium for replacement until recently, not that long ago a turbografx/pc engine cd drive with a read error was a death sentence due entirely to a single gear in the laser drive train that was impossible to replace prior to 3d printing finally catching up, that little sucker would invariably turn into brittle paste and even now its a failure you can pretty much expect on a non working unit
A basic 3D printer and a roll of ABS plastic should be able to solve the issue of lacking spare parts. Perhaps a resin printer for the tiny, finnicky gears, but it would be the easiest way to get around the issue of spare gears and such.
It's a plastic clone of an Aristo-Craft import, right down to the stickers on the cab and headlight. There must be a couple of drive incarnations to them, I remember opening one to find just one axle gear which spun on the axle. I also remember a big open frame motor in it like the F-unit the gear came from. But that was a long, long time ago too.
HO scale wheelies! Now that was funny. I've got one of those little Kettle engines. Plastic deterioriates quickly. W Rusty Lane K9POW in eastern Tennessee
Nice restoration on this man i don’t know I might even find one at a train show someday who knows? 17:21 btw that’s funny that engine was doing wheelie like a dirt bike would do I think without the weight.
You aren't wrong there is a moulding of lead missing as my one has it and thanks for the video I haven't had the problem of the stripped gear but don't tend to run it as it's a bit of a speed demon and runs everything else off the track.
Nice job. It probably didn't run that well when it was new. They always made weird side to side wiggle movements under power . When I was growing up these things sometimes didn't even run brand new straight out of the box. But they were so cheap that it didn't matter. Just go buy another one and leave it sitting in the rail yard as a static model.
Can get grab kits of various gears from many many online retailers for a few dollars shipped, like bags of hundreds of all sizes. If you have a need for something super specific then entry level 3D printers these days can handle it. The catch is that you have to spend quite a bit of time learning how to design parts in a CAD program, a task which many loathe to do.
Interesting, I've had one of these exact models with the same livery in my collection for 20 years now and never had any issues. Thats wild to hear that it's notoriously unreliable. Maybe mine came from a different batch, or perhaps a previous owner modified it.
Great video, and great to see someone else's parts bin! I've got a very similar steamy with the truck gear stripped (that's a single truck gear, and it was EXPOSED through the gear cover). It never was any good at hauling but sparks and wheelies were A+. Glad I found your videos and look forward to binging your channel now. Keep on keepin on Man!
The pop a wheelie was cool & funny and have you ever considered using a dc soldering iron? it’s a lower heat iron for work on electronics and smaller wires.
Harrison, Just a thought...perhaps if you can not find ready made Replacement gears, if you have access to the materials and a 3d printer, and computer knowledge, you might be able to produce what you need. Probably with better materials. Just a thought- hope it helps. Good luck, sir.
Hey I've got one of those little beauties. It's over 25years old. To everything there are bad ones. In my opinion for a starter loco it's an honest little loco. Chris Holznagel
I had this exact locomotive once. I picked it up from a train show for $5. I just needed something to pull a short Christmas train around our Christmas tree. Holy crap it wasn't even worth the $5 I paid for it. It pulled the cars but the engine was very flimsy and eventually that exact same red wire broke off the motor and I couldn't get it back in place. LifeLike, Tyco, and Model Power are the 3 worst companies to buy train stuff from, IMO. All they have are just cheap toys. Bachman is also in that toy category but they actually do have some decent stuff. But yeah, this LifeLike is a POS at best and belongs in the trash.
Bachmann made even worse models at the same time, their modern stuff is way different. These were not reliable models but they can still be fun to mess around with.
If you find a fitting part somewhere, or a gear is complete, but split and won't be strong enough when glued, use it to make a silicone mold. Then, cast new epoxy or polyurethane copies.
My (only) teakettle works great, the only issue is the boiler screw peg had sheared off at some point. I don't remember if I glued it back but either way, mine works fine. I guess I lucked out!
Your nails seem to be in good health. No solder burns or drill holes. Good hygiene is important. Another great save. I love your box of parts. Lots of stories in there. Maybe one day you’ll build a robot from all the parts. And the robot will learn your movements and mannerisms. And then one night your dad will come down to the basement say dinner is ready and both you and the robot will answer in unison “Coming father!” And your dad will be like “Holy cow, I can’t tell them apart” But he’ll inspect your hands and find that only the human Harrison has clean fingernails.
Check eBay in the gear section for small plastic gears most of them come from China you can usually get a bag of them with warm gears and all different size Gears that fit 130 size motors shafts They're usually very inexpensive but they come from China. AlsoThat gear looks to be the same size and shape as a lot of gears in the new bright cheap RC cars. If they do work Take two of the same gears together and do away with The metal bushing You may have to file some of the plastic to make it fit But it will give you a wider gear For more contact area
You can buy all of these gears and you can make them pretty easily, especially if they are only split. You can simply "copy" them using silicone and resin. Check out Randy Rainne's channel for a video called how to make gears.
The slotted side rods are probably due to the lack of precision of the clocking of the gears on the drivers. Being a very low line model accuracy and precision kinda go out the door. 😃
I'm not sure what you are referring to with "Diesel" engine but all thise engines are electric and basically are the same save designs right? That engine looks extra small.
a 3-D printer that works with UV resin would be ideal to re build these gears ( but if you are patient and skillful you can also make them out of brass, which I have already done for another project of mein )
