David Johnston posted:
I have two such 1989 6-18000 switchers my original which I bought new has hundreds of hours on it and the worm wheel shows no signs of wear. I did swap the pinion on the motor shaft and it's mate to raise the final drive ratio a bit and both pinion and spur are now brass I did that when the loco was nearly new. The B6 I bought on eBay was heavly used and both nylon gears look fine. Lionel did use nylon on some intermediate idle gears on a couple of locos that have cause problems. However as far as my B6s are concerned they seem to be doing fine. I have a couple of General Models brass kits which I built back in the sixties and they have some sort of pressed fiber gears not too different from the Phenolic board used in electronic boards and they have been in use for over fifty years.
I think what drives the value of the 1989 B6 down is that both MTH and K-Line made B6s with modern electronics and if I am not mistaken Lionel has made their version of the K-Line B6 also. All that and it is a bit of work to cram TMCC into a B6 I've done two. Well I'm about 50% through the second one. Photos show an LCRU2 just laid in the boiler to assess whether once the e-unit and smoke unit were removed there would be room for it and a fan driven smoke unit, there is. I built this one to try and get my original, which has all ERR boards, back from my brother. I still have to install the RS 2.5 board in the tender and add another 5 pin plug under the loco and make a 10 pin pigtail to mate with the plugs on the loco. I may make a new tender floor out of aluminum and use it for the RailSounds heatsink which should save a bit of space inside but only if I have to. I also added a coil coupler and pickup roller to the original trucks. As heavy as the B6 is it has a lot of power that it cannot use and I plan to cast some lead weights to fit in a couple spaces in the boiler and make a pair of air tanks of lead for under the cab. j
