Blackstone K27's


7

747flier

Well-Known Member
Ah the fun of buying of off EBAY: I have two Blackstone K27's (expensive) and the first one I ran with DCC wanted to hang up at turnouts, loosing power. I went and tore up and rewired a bunch of turnouts only to discover that it was getting power feed on one side from only the rear tender truck, none on that side from th loco.

The other one the guy had to have known it was damaged, missing part of the front pilot but more importantly he had broken the screw off that holds the wire bundle up under the cab. That may be a PITA to get out! Then the headlight does not work. Might be a programming issue, there are some errors that could have been made with the CV values.

A danger in buying items before you have track to run them on.
 
After doing some minor troubleshooting, the one with the stripped screw was even worse, a small screw keeps the harness on a post and the idiot who sold me this had broken the post off, which is part of the chassis. The other one I took the boiler off to reveal no connection to any of the pins on the connector to one side of the loco chassis power pickup. Since this goes through a board and proprietary bundle package, not user serviceable. So 0/2 so far with these. Arrgh!
 
747flier said:
After doing some minor troubleshooting, the one with the stripped screw was even worse, a small screw keeps the harness on a post and the idiot who sold me this had broken the post off, which is part of the chassis. The other one I took the boiler off to reveal no connection to any of the pins on the connector to one side of the loco chassis power pickup. Since this goes through a board and proprietary bundle package, not user serviceable. So 0/2 so far with these. Arrgh!
Click to expand...
I would contact eBay, unless the second one was described as "damaged" or usually "spares or repair" your entitled to a refund, as it was damaged when sold, which the seller must declare on the post, even if they were sold as non-returnable, it's part of eBay policy to refund mis-sold items.(and usually you get to keep the item too.)

The first one with the problem contacts, as it did run your kinda out of luck with, but I'd simply see about doing a rewire and adding a light board or a drop in replacement for it.
 
It's possible that previous owner had similar issues of not being able to run them without stalling. Those older models probably have one side pickup on locomotive and the other side pick up is on the tender. Have you thought about installing small capacitor in the tender? I know that guys in DCC are hooking up capacitors to decoders for that very purpose.
 
I sent it back to Soundtraxx for repair. It is supposed to have pickup from all four drivers on each side plus two tender wheels on each side. A little work with an ohmmeter revealed that there was no driver pickup on one side, so something broken in there. As these have extensive length of pickup no capacitor should be required. The vendors such as Digitrax and Soundtraxx have such units available.

I am pleased with adding the DCC to my KATO diesels I narrow gauged, seems as if the run more smoothly and absolutely superb low speed performance.

Tom
 
747flier said:
I sent it back to Soundtraxx for repair. It is supposed to have pickup from all four drivers on each side plus two tender wheels on each side. A little work with an ohmmeter revealed that there was no driver pickup on one side, so something broken in there. As these have extensive length of pickup no capacitor should be required. The vendors such as Digitrax and Soundtraxx have such units available.

I am pleased with adding the DCC to my KATO diesels I narrow gauged, seems as if the run more smoothly and absolutely superb low speed performance.

Tom
Click to expand...
update us when you get it back , im curious 😁
 
Their loco Tech Norm Carnaby did a good job on it and is an a very helpful person even by message or e-mail. As it turned out he said all that needed to be done was tightening of a screw. On the KATO's I was having some intermittent contact issues and ended up soldering a short flexible wire to the truck pickup bars on either side which cured that issue. Important that both trucks have full pickup and transmission!

I get various opinions about the utility of the current keepers.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.



Back
Top