Athearn fast starting characteristics.


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dalehenigman

New Member
Hi! My fast starting problem is like most everybodys with athearn blue box. I've hard wired th motor, worked over the gearboxes by shaving edges of gears, used turtle wax, dress the motor commutator. Got the gear boxes to free-roll down about a 10% slope. (both with a 2-axle and 3- axle truck.) I think i've got the athearns working 'bout as good as they can. BUT......they still dont start quite as slow and smooth as a lifelike loco, 4-axle, with athearn-like motor and athearn-like gears and 12:1 gearing just like athearn. So I am curious as to whats the difference between athearn and lifelike? Also my athearn loco's starting is superb when the locos are at 50 deg temp. with stiff lube. Is the drag most significant in the motor bearing, or the gears, and how can I duplicate that drag at 70 deg, or do I want to? Finally, is a replacement can motor going to help over the athearn (high output) motor, considering 12:1 gears? Thanks.....Dale.
 
The blue box locos come with a basic motor that works best at a scale 90 mph. Other than that, slow switching moves isn't going to be to reliable without a little hand interaction.
Athearn makes an upgrade motor that is standard in their Genesis line that will drop right into the blue box chassis. It runs quite a bit better.
On your blue box motor, have you tried the kickstart CV feature? It is CV65 and has a range of 0-9. Usually setting it at a 7 is sufficient to get the motor turning at the first increment of your throttle. If the motor still kicks over to fast, try trimming the start voltage down using CV2. Start out with about 20 and make adjustments until you have it the way you want it. The full range is 0 to 250.
 
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I have 2 Genesis locos both start WAY TO FAST,they pull ok but even trying to change CV#2 didnt help. Mine seem to not like the 3% grade in my layout either.
 
yard master said:
I have 2 Genesis locos both start WAY TO FAST,they pull ok but even trying to change CV#2 didnt help. Mine seem to not like the 3% grade in my layout either.
Click to expand...

Have you tried slowing the start up down using CV3? Usually setting this one to about a 9 or 10 will give ya a slower startup.
 
If your engines still start too fast with cv2 set to 1 or 0, try reducing cv6 to something like 50. That will give a proportion lower to start.
You will probably have to set cv5 to 255 to keep top speed up.
 
bnsf971 said:
If your engines still start too fast with cv2 set to 1 or 0, try reducing cv6 to something like 50. That will give a proportion lower to start.
You will probably have to set cv5 to 255 to keep top speed up.
Click to expand...

I think CV6 only sets the mid throttle speed. It can never be lower than CV 5 or else the loco woul slow down when you dial past 50 on the throttle.
 
?????? Guess this doesn't apply to DC locomotives. I have only one Genisis locomotive and it has great low speed characteristics and will crawl extremely slow. You could time it with a calender.

I have a number of old Athearn BB locomotives, but not a single one has the original Athearn motor. They have all had a motor transplant now sporting NWSL can motors. They are now all extremely fine operating locomotives with great low speed capabilities. When I started my layout, there wasn't much choice for power like we have now. Athearn was the least of all evils, but with a bit of work now run an good as any of todays new power.

By the way, what is a CV-5 or CV-6? :confused:;)
 
CV5 is the max speed control. If you have one loco that runs faster than all the others in a consist, you can adjust CV5 so the top speed matches the other locos.
CV6 is the mid point control. Once again, this helps to match the speed of other locos that you are MUing this loco to. Both of these CVs are a simple form of the more detailed speed table feature where you can match the entire speed range of your locos.
 
Montanan:

The US Navy says CV5 was the original USS Yorktown and CV6 was the USS Enterprise, both of WWII aircraft carrier fame. There's some other CV listings in this thread, but all I can think of are the carriers they represent! :)

Photoman475
 
Thanks, that clears everything up. ;)

I can remember some guys tinkering with setting when visiting a large model railroad club trying to get some DCC locomotives to run together. Guess that's what they were messing with. Like I have mentioned many times, I still operate DC at home, but do enjoy DCC when visiting other modelers across the country during operating sessions.

Hey photoman, my favorite was DLG-7. Spent over 4 years on her.
 
I have several athearns (DC only) and with my old MRC 4 amp transformer there is a pulse setting which allows a crawl, works especially well with the Athearn S-12 switcher, possibly geared lower than the F-7. All of my athearns are at least 20 years old.

I haven't noticed it on the F-7 but now I am curious and when I get home i am going to see.
 
I use a GML throttle which is a hand held throttle with memory. This allows me to unplug the controller and go to another location and plug it in and the train will keep moving even with the handheld unit unplugged. It does not have a pulse mode, but is an excellent controller. I run it through a set of volt/amp meters. When I had my old Athearn locomotives with the original motors, some of them could draw close to one amp if pulling a string of cars up a grade. My old original Atlas Alcos barely moved the meter under the same load, at less than a quarter of an amp.

After replacing the stock Athearn motor with a NWSL can motor, they were right on par with the Atlas locomotives and also they didn't slow down nearly as much as the old Athearn motors did on a grade.

When I started building my locomotive fleet over 25 years ago there really wasn't a lot of choice when it came to locomotives, and at the time Athearn were among the better ones. I has read an article in a model railroad magazine back then about repowering the Athearn locomotives and I never looked back. Today, many years later they run as good as any now locomotive on the market.
 
Montanan:

I couldn't help it-as an amateur military historian, as soon as I saw the CV, I just figured it had to be about aircraft carriers! And sir, thank you for your service!

I have all DC powered locos and most are Athearn blue box. The idea of repowering with NWSL motors is interesting, but given the size of my layout, I'm not sure I'd ever do more than one or two locos. I need to think about that one some more, but finishing the upper level scenery needs to be done first, then the rewiring of the lower level trackage before that can gets past the Plywood Central stage.

Photoman475
 
It could be a hassle to repower a fleet at one time. When I did mine, my layout was under construction with just a few feet of track powered. While waiting for orders to come in, I was working on locomotives at the same time. I now have a little over 30 locomotives, and only 6 are the old Athearn BB types. All of them ended up being custom painted and were apart. I also had a dealership with Walthers at the time so the expense wasn't much either. While waiting for paint to dry, the sintered iron wheels were changer to nickle silver with NWSL wheels and they got their new motors. Also while the were apart, I also installed constant directional lighting, which was a big thing back then. One thing that did bother me back then was the over size width of their geeps. When Atlas came out with their exceptionally great running Alcos, I ended completing my custom painted fleet with them. The repowered Athearn locomotives not only ran as good as the Atlas, but with the new motors ran at almost identical speeds allowing me to use them in multiple unit configuration if needed for pulling grades.

I was a bit of a newbie into HO scale at the time having just changing from N scale. N scale locomotives at the time were really poor running locomotives at the time, and was the biggest factor in changing scales. If they would have run like N scale locomotives available today, I probably wouldn't have changed scales. Construction on the new HO scale layout was slow as we had no hobby shops and waiting for orders to come in and the problem with many items being backordered gave me plenty of time to read magazines and after seeing articles on repowering Athearn BB locomotives at the time gave me something to keep me busy.

Twenty five years later with the converted locomotives still running like new I am really pleased and think I really lucked out.
 
I was checking out my slow speeds with the old athearns last night, out of curiousity, and this old transformer with the pulse setting on the throttle does make a big difference.

If you are DC, and do shopping on ebay, these can be picked up for around 10 to $20. I got mine for $4 plus $7 shipping, which was a steal, but I wasn't looking for one and noticed all the features and snapped it up.

I am going to make a speed comparison video this weekend. I am sure the more expensive stuff may offer slightly smoother and maybe quieter service, but if this is what you have to work with, it is good to make the best of it.
 
thanks, guys......I'm running D C. So far, I've dropped a Kato motor in a bluebox SD40-2, and it's performance did not seem to improve my slow speed any. I don't know if there are can motors out there that are better than kato, just trying to do what research I can before I spend $60 on something that wont help. Next I tried a motor out of a Lifelike GP20, and it improved my speed/smoothness noticeably. Big difference in the appearance and quality in the Lifelike over the athearn. BTW, Ath ac44 rtr are 12:1 gears, the lifelike GP20 is 12:1, the big heavy SD 50 is 14.1. the parts list for genesis shows a 15 tooth wheel gear. might try to get a lifelike motor..............Thx....Dale
 
Dalehenigman , your right how could I get it so mixed up its was the Tirpitz and Scharnhorst. I also think the Graf Spee was there as well?
 
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