Broke or inoperative CW 80 fan.

@Bill Kaczmarek posted:

I was changing the incandescent lamps in one of my Baby Madison cars to a LED strip and after I completed my rectifier circuit, I wanted to test it before I sealed the car back up.  So I took one leg of my input and used the accessory binding post on my CW which was energized (not realizing there was a full 12 volts there) and then tried to connect the the other lead to the opposite accessory post.  As soon as I touched the lead, I drew and arc and the fan stopped on the transformer.

My questions are 1, how bad did I break this? Literally have no idea. I could be nothing, it could be just the fan, could be worse.

And 2, how do I fix it? Open it, find the bad componet(s), replace them, test, final assembly.

Everything else seems to work fine.  Whistles work and bells ring. That implies this may just be the fan.

Is there an internal fuse or something that I should look for when I dissect this tomorrow? The ONLY fuse is a glass fuse between the transformer and the control PCB. If it blows, you get nothing- no green power led, no fan, no power out of any output- so if it still works-  not this fuse.

Thanks for any help.

The fan is a cheap 12V brushless design with internal electronics. So  it is possible the failure is limited to the fan.

https://ogrforum.ogaugerr.com/topic/cw-80-fan-noise

https://ogrforum.ogaugerr.com/...80-disassembly-tools

https://ogrforum.ogaugerr.com/topic/lionel-cw-80-fan