Need some Train Repair Help- Lionel Burlington E-5's short in reverse- Question about smoke motor!

HUH?

Exactly. I have never seen this one before.  Great in forward direction. Rearward in command it trips the breaker.

I looked on the part web site and I am suspecting the DCDS motor driver board. but it looks ok...

Had a Lionel Niagara (big surprise) acting in a similar way a few years ago; never noticed any "melting" of anything, and it was sporadic at first, but a new driver board was the cure. Everything "looked" OK with my loco, too.

J Daddy: This could be a longshot, but I'd inspect the "hot" lead where it attaches to the top of the rear truck and goes down to hold one of the pickup rollers to the truck block. Maybe it's loose and shifting in reverse mode and shorting on the truck block. Also inspect the plastic molded pickup holder for cracks/missing plastic.

Good luck.

I'm with Marty, I don't think this is the DCDS board, or at least that's not the only problem.  Make sure you don't have wiring issues first.  If nothing is amiss in the wiring, test the rear truck motor with a DC supply in both directions while disconnected from the electronics.  Make sure it doesn't draw excessive current in one direction.

I also agree with Marty - I had to fix this same issue on an Atlas TMCC SD40.  The hot lead on one of the trucks was rubbing on the frame and the insulation had been worn away.  I re-positioned the lead and put shrink tubing on it to fix.

Thanks guys, that's what I am suspect of... I am going to do a thorough tear down of it tonight. I will let you know what I find. Removing the lead to the truck will be my first move. 

Well I found that the lead truck had a frayed wire that was cut. I realized then that this locomotive was rewired. Maybe even to run in forward position conventionally.

So now I am going to have to check the wiring completely from the motors, pick ups and to the DCDR board... there are some splices that just do not look right.

Is there a wiring schematic out there that could help me determine which wire goes where?

Well look what was hiding under the main board carrier...k

Still does not explain why it only shorted in the reversed direction!

Could anyone tell me why this Capacitor is here? should I remove it? 

Don't play with the cap, it's there for a reason.  That's the Odyssey harness, right?

As far as the short in one direction, sometimes the wiring flexes just enough in one direction to cause a short when you have a situation like that.

Yes its off of the DCDR board. I won't touch it. So I am going to remove the hidden melted wiring and see if that eliminates the short.

Fixing melted wiring is always a good first step!

Ok - so all the melted wiring that I could find is replaced and the locomotive is doing the same thing...

great forward, hit reverse and it shorts.

So I am convinced something is amiss on the DCDS board. When I went to pull the DCDS board to swap another one in its place- something I wanted to avoid - I noticed on of the insulator washers on the screws was melted. The nut had lost torque... so I thought if I remove the screw and nut it would be ok?

Nope.  So next is with a continuity checker I check the screws heads. I get continuity  on the hot rail and neutral rail on all the screw heads except the one with the melted insulator ... Is there a way to confirm if this board is bad before I swap it out with a good working one?

This may have been a good job for Elmer. Bert is trying to find a new guy to come in once a week to pick up the jobs and bring them back a week later. Hope this will shack out.

Gary

I think you're probably at the issue.  If you have melting there, that is most likely the issue.

Ok, well I have a donor engine that I am going to pull the board from and see what happens.

Got my attention, now I want to see what happened.

Ya, with the melted insulator it is probably a shorted power transistor.

Ok ...so chalk this one up to being in the know...

I swapped the donor board out of another parts engine... took forever to get the boards out, due to having to disassembly the trucks to get access to these boards... Lionel really did a poor job in service studies on these older diesels. I think they were literally designed as throw away toys!

Noticed on the good board the black spacers where on the opposite side of the nuts... WHAT?!

somebody repaired this thing and put the spacers on the wrong side. They should be on the screw head side.

See picture below

I proceeded to use the good board and properly installed the black washer spacers screw head side and it was up and running...

I now know MORE than I ever wanted to know about repairing these things...

So all is well that ends well ? Well no.

I put the sound boards back in and the sounds would not come on... felt and re-seated the sound boards and the sound driver board - amp board on top of the sound chip board was hot to the touch... ok  - turned to the donor board and swapped the boards out and viola  - sounds.

Next was the smoke unit. no fan motor?... resistor comes on but no fan... so swapped out from the donor engine  new smoke unit- again resistor works no fan... so question - what controls the fan motor? There is no separate voltage driver board for either donor or the E-5 and the smoke units are exactly the same units...

R2 board ?

Thanks for the help...

The smoke fan is powered by the same power that powers the heater, and the regulator is on-board the smoke unit.  The smoke unit and fan should run on the bench connected to 10-12 volts AC.  According to Lionel, this is your smoke unit, dumb unit with 27 ohm heater and on-board 5V supply for the fan.

Yes John - that is it... have 3 now that I cannot get the motor to run. So the triac powers the heater element correct? What on these boards is going then ?

Those are self-contained.  If the fan motor runs when you unplug it and test it, there are only three components on the board, diode, cap, and regulator.  My experience has been the regulator and diode first, then the cap.  They don't fail that often, so having three bad ones seems a lot.  Make sure that the two outside pins of the power connector are actually connected, many of those have a trace on the PCB, don't know what this one looks like up close.

John - I checked the Voltage going into the motor at the board with a DMM. It reads 5 volts.

Jumped the motor with a 9 volt battery and no go... so looks like its the motor. Donor smoke unit had a bad motor too... go figure? Never thought the motors would be the weakest link.

I just noticed the DCDS board that was a donor was acting up today... jitter movement in speed steps after a 5 min of run time... and one of the two front head lights will not come on ...  so I guess I will be buying a new ERR board.

The front head light not coming on must be a main board issue? Or could the DCDS cause this too. Odd that the old board did not have an issue.

If it weren't for bad luck, you'd have no luck at all!

Smoke motors have been problematic, I always keep them in stock.  They're little cheap motors with anemic brushes.

The lights are controlled by the R2LC, the leads just go through the motherboard and on to the lights.  If only one bulb isn't coming on, are you sure it isn't a bad bulb?

Some of those smoke units are meant to have a solder bridge to allow the Center rail pickup to power element and Diode to run 5V Regulator.  Otherwise you need a second AC wire into the 3 pin connection.  Examine the top of the board for the bridge.  Pin 1 and 3 should have continuity.  Sometimes they are manufactured without the solder jumper.  G

The smoke unit fan motors sometimes get over-doused with fluid. I did take one apart, cleaned the small brushes and assembled it together. Very small pieces to work with but was able to get it going.

Well I have some parts a coming. So it's going to get interesting again.