Vision Line Challenger #3985

Berkshire President posted:

Peter Araujo posted:

JFC454 posted:

Peter Araujo posted:

I also noticed that tender on my 3985 doesn't work. No sounds, no function, no nothing out of it. The engine works fine by the way. What shall I do to fix this?

Did it ever work?  Mine worked for a day and then went completely dead.  No lights or sounds.   I ran it anyway for a few hours and then, all of a sudden, while it was running it came back to life.  I had performed several engine resets, but nothing had worked until it decided all by itself to work again.  The engine section had no problems, just the tender.

A little update: I just fixed mine yesterday. I gave the tender itself a little kickstart with my Z4000 transformer, and that did the trick. Now the tender works properly as it should.

What, exactly, do you mean by gave the tender a kick start?

I placed the tender on the tracks, and applied 18-20 volts of power to the track.

Peter Araujo posted:

I placed the tender on the tracks, and applied 22 volts of power to the track.

YIKES!   This is a VERY bad idea!  Max voltage specification for Legacy is 19V.  I can't imagine how over voltage "fixed" anything, clearly there was actually nothing wrong.

I think I heard him say “Ok you dog...take this!!” when he hit it with the 22 volts.

And it'll be better when the Auxiliary tenders come in October.

Peter Araujo posted:

And it'll be better when the Auxiliary tenders come in October.

Except that the current UP auxiliary water tenders have been completely rebuilt, more than 10 years ago, and thus the models no longer represent the prototype.

Peter,  I would be curious if the power plug to the tender sound board is making/not making contact because the wires have a lot of tension from the bundled wrap inside the tender and pull on the contacts.  You might want to check the plug the next time the tender acts up.  I had to pull a little extra gray power wire from the bundle and re-plug it into the sound board.  It is fine now.

I would not go over 18 volts on Legacy equipment.  I run my ZWL at 17 volts with the 990 Remote.

I like my eggs fried, but not my engine boards.

Sincerely, John Rowlen