I am a "value shopper" and was looking for a scale proportion F-Unit. The current Atlas Locos look great, but are out of my price range. While I have been buying a lot of Weaver Items, I had an experience with one of their "chain drive units", and was not impressed. As a retired Mechanical Design Engineer that is as polite as I can be about that design. Because of this I also know just enough to be dangerous when it comes to Electronic Circuits as you will see from my questions below. I come from HO, so all of this seems very complicated.
So I purchased a K-Line F7A Unit by itself. It has no box, accessories or DIRECTIONS. From reading prior post, it is the 3rd gen, has mirrors and smoke unit. It has a male tether (pins) hanging out the back. It appears that this was part of a 3 unit set. The F7B was unpowered, had a male tether on one end, female on the other. The other F7A which was already sold had a female tether. I have hooked up power and this unit does NOT run independently, so must be trailing unit. I think it is beautiful (SP Black Widow), so want to make it work.
I had posted last week in wrong forum, GunRunnerJohn and Norton had responded, but couldn't see all your replies, I want to thank you. I did find out from the seller I could return if it wouldn't run, so didn't cancel order.
I am including some pictures of the Loco. I am no expert on this, so need some advice. If I had instructions or better yet a schematic, it would help greatly, does someone have one they can post, or E-mail me? I hooked regulated DC to the unplugged harness to test the motors/drive and they work great. Same with Smoke Unit fan motor. The board obviously has the a rectifier to convert the AC (4 Power Diodes). Not sure if it has the ERU, do the components next to the Power diodes, left of center on the board, perform that function? Also noticed that it has a speed sensor on the forward motor, is this used for speed matching the two motors or only comes into play when MUed to the other unit? Or is this for the Cruise Control? So if I want to operate Independently "conventional", can I just rewire to get power directly to the board? If so where on the board does the AC Input go. Would all the lights function correctly? Any help would be most appreciated.
Also dislike the front appearance, believe that it might have originally come with an optional closed or dummy coupler, fixed pilot. Any idea where I could obtain one? Looks like moving the electrocoupler to the rear truck should be fairly easy. Thank you!
