I had to re-read the initial post and several of the follow on comments here to grasp what had been posted. Let me say from the start, had the train tender been sitting at one of our benches with a customers locomotive or in the case of prewar, the motor assembly, and he whipped out his 5 towels, his punch or nail set and a hammer and started to drive out axles, he would be sitting outside before he knew what happened. I've seen this kind of work all too often when first time customers bring in their trains for repair and it sickens me. There are too many good inexpensive tools available to have to do this. David Johnston mentioned that the Lionel wheel puller sometimes chips flanges, presumably on tight wheels. Lionel published a fix for this and it's simple. Two strips of 1/16" thick by 3/18" wide tool steel strip. Place a strip between each jaw foot and the back of the wheel. This spreads the force across the rear of the wheel rather than concentrating it at the jaw foot. Someone mentioned removing and replacing wheels at $75 an hour - I wish we could charge that, but it doesn't happen. Our shop rate is $55 an hour, but it doesn't take anywhere near an hour to change a set of tinplate O gauge or standard gauge wheels. The meatball surgery mentioned here makes it difficult for everyone, especially those entering the hobby. They are quickly disenchanted when their 400E wobbles down the track like the Toonerville Trolley. As an example of this kind of haphazard repair, I just finished a motor on a 400E that had just been purchase by the customer as running like new. Well, it ran like new for about 5 minutes and suddenly locked up tight with the wheels out of synch. Once I got the motor completely apart, which included splitting the motor halves, I found that it had an early 2-61 armature and pinion, with a shaft diameter of .112. The shop that worked on it previously didn't split the motor, they just changed the intermediate gears and gear plate. Well, the intermediate gears were .010 undersize in diameter and the gear plate was for a later motor having an armature with a .125 shaft diameter. Whatever was left of the original pinion gear on the amature was so badly chewed up that it was beyond use. Many years ago while serving my apprenticeship as a tool maker, the shop forman took me aside and told me that if I remember nothing else, remember that you can do things two ways, right or wrong. If you do it right, you do it once. If you do it wrong, you do it twice.
Dennis
