Weaver Alco FA's

In my opinion only. Never buy anything on ebay you are not prepared to fix or trouble shoot. Good experience anyway.

Ron H

Ron H posted:

In my opinion only. Never buy anything on ebay you are not prepared to fix or trouble shoot. Good experience anyway.

Ron H

That is exactly the mindset that I use for my eBay purchases. Not a problem for me because I like to fix things, especially things that are cheap because they are broken.

I bought a Weaver GP38-2 (2-rail) once which turned out to be 'China drive'. It also had nasty cast metal pilots, metal handrails that stopped short at the corners as per 3-rail locos, & was rather noisy and 'rough' in operation.

It seems that late-production 2-rail locos were based on 3-rail models, like Atlas Trainman but without the refinement!! I suspect that is what you also have here.

I have 2 other Weaver Geeps, & made sure to check photos or ask before buying as to what sort of motor/drive set-up they had. As for the China-drive one, I sold it on, & as far as I recall, for about what I'd paid, so didn't lose out.

it sounds like you are not a "fiddler", so you may want to return them.   I have a bunch of them with single motor drives and I like them a lot.   They are easy to repair.    You could replace the drives with single motor drives from P&D hobbies (he bought the Weaver parts).   However, at the least you would have to make bolsters and at worst a whole underframe.    And you have the cost of the new drive added.  

I think there are 6 screws on the underside that come out to drop the whole mechanism out.     If you try it, work carefully and DO NOT use a power driver.   use a small screw driver and work carefully, the screws are directly into the plastic shell and it is easy to strip them.     When putting the screws in, I set them on top of the hole and turn them gently in the wrong direction until I hear and feel a light click to find the original threads.   then I screw in the right way gently with a manual screwdriver.

Another option is to return these and look for a pair of single motor ones at a train show or for sale on the net.    P&D has parts to maintain the single motor version, I don't know that anyone has parts for the china drive.

The earlier Alcos had axle gears that were not aged before assembly, and they almost always split.  They are easily replaced with new geared wheelsets.  Sometimes sprockets crack that way too, but usually a hub crack means the shaft just rotates.

The China drive Weaver keeps are easy to spot. You need to look for the gap in the pilots.

 Thanks for the responses. I managed to get it apart. What threw me is that the front 2 screws were missing and it took me a while to spot the screws in the fuel tank. I think the missing front screws was the cause of the front motor shaft being able to come in contact with the plastic shell. I'm going to try putting one of the rear screws up front until I can find some new ones. If anyone knows where to get a pair of the 2" thin black screws that hold the shell to the frame I would be interested.  I didn't find any cracked gears on this although one axle gear binds a bit. I'm going to try greasing it up good and hope that some run time will loosen it up a little. I think these engines have been boxed up for a pretty good while. I've decided to keep this set. The B unit doesn't really seem to have any issues and I've wanted to paint a set of these into UP for a while now.

       Jeff 

Jeff,

It is probably only one of the motor truck combinations in the A unit giving you the trouble.  If you remove one motor, try it again and see if it is still rough , then do the other. If removing neither motor smooths it out then you have a bad connection or bad gears beyond the motor worm gear.  in the end considering that you have a b with two motors going down to one motor on the a may not be a problem.  It should run fine on one.

Scott