Yesterday while at the TCA swap meet in Raleigh I told DGJones of this forum that "I'd pay $500 if someone could tell me how to fix the binding in the front center pickups of the WBB sedans." Fully half of the 14 WBB sedans I have bought develop this problem eventually, two right out of the box: the front pickup starts to bind and not move smoothly up and down. While the tiny spring is not really strong enough, augmenting it with a plastic "helper spring" (last slide here) helps a lot but often the binding becomes jamming - the pickup just stops moving at all, jamming in a partly or all up position.
I decided that if it was worth it to me (it is) I'd spend time investigating it today. The solution - at least a solution that fixed all seven of the binding/jammed ones I have - is to carefully cut away the inner wall of plastic container for the pickup. This housing is just maybe a tiny, tiny bit too narrow and the pickup binds. This works so good that I have decided it is a total fix - and therefore it was only fair that I paid myself $500 - Iwill of course spend it on something important, like a set of passenger cars to go with the new Lionel E8s.
These first two pictures show the center pickup and the plastic "box" that holds it it place, as it comes from the factory. The pickup telescopes up and down inside the box which edges you see on each side of it.
This plastic box holds the telescoping center pickup mechanism. It also provide electric insulation from the metal chassis: the chassis in cnnected to the axles/wheels which are electrically connected to the outer rails. The center pickup is of course connected to the center rail.
The photo below is the modified pickup. I used a new #11 X-Acto blade and cut away on the inside of both sides of the plastic "container" for the center pickup as you can see, widening the room for the center pickup to move up and down inside it. I did this with the center pickup in place, just by reaching in and cutting carefully with the blade, then making sure I removed everything that I cut out and no debris left in there. This permits a bit more room for the pickup to move up and down in the plastic housing, but leaves sufficient electrical insulation between it and the metal chassis.
This is the plastic "helper spring" I now add to every WBB sedan I bet. It is a thin (.5 mm) piece of styrene plastic with a small hole in in, held down by the screw that normally (and still, as here) holds down the grounding wire to the chassis. This small spring triples the pressure on the top of the center pickup pillar and pushes it down. It cures mild binded but not the type that seems to always eventually develop, but with the cutaway shown above giving a bit more room there seems to be little if any binding and the additonal pressure helps make better contact.
