gunrunnerjohn posted:I've had three of the Canon motors croak in Legacy steam in the past several years. Two of them failed dead shorted and took out the RCMC with them! I'm totally unimpressed with the Canon replacement, bring back the Pittman motors please!
Buhler? Buhler?? My 11203 Berk has a dual-shaft Buhler motor with two flywheels. Word on the street was that these fairly expensive motors were also prone to burning out under load, at least in the Vision PRR CC2's. I believe the Canon FN38 is a 5-pole motor, I wonder if it has skewed laminations? It may also have more turns of thinner wire for better speed-voltage characteristics. GRJ, if you do a post-mortem on one I would love to hear what you find out.
Pete re: Articulated vs. Northern, #1 thing is the total adhesive weight. Typically there isn't much weight on the front set of drivers; they would probably slip except for the fact that they're permanently geared to the rear set. Second consideration is the rigid wheelbase. Some of the larger eight-drivered rigid locos struggle to pull themselves around the sharpest curves they're rated for! [IMO the rated curves are kind of optimistic; mfr's want to sell trains!] The final consideration, at least with regard to continuous running, is the effective gear ratio. For years MTH used the same fairly small 16-tooth worm wheel on all of their locos. So I have no doubt that a Premier Y-6 would be more comfortable pulling a heavy load than one of the first-generation Santa Fe 2900s, because the motor is turning ~30% more RPM for the distance traveled. Around Y2K, MTH's design board wised up and started using larger worm wheels on the large Northerns, and compound gearing on the smaller steamers. So the first Premier Niagaras had great characteristics for starting a train under load. I would say these might equal an articulated in pulling power, at least on very wide radius curves.
