Hairy Engines

[Larry]

I got some engines from a guy here on the Forum about 2 weeks ago & they had so much cat hair inside the engine that it had wrapped around the axles so much it had pushed the wheels out of the end of the plastic gear. Also, the Armature on the motor was wrapped w/so much cat hair that the motor was squealing around the bearings. Then inside the trucks there was a lot more hair wrapped around the gear shafts. On the engine itself there was hair all inside the shell. Looked like a rat sleeping in there in miniature.
I was told that the cat never came into the trainroom. So, you guys that have dogs, cats & rabbits inside the train room, beware of problems in the future.
I worked on 3 engines for a kid today that has a layout on his carpeted floor.
Everything in those engines had carpet fibers wrapped around it. Looked like a fibre filled sound deading shell. He couldn't figure out why his engines were jerking & wouldn't run at speeds. Took me about 2 hrs. to clean those things out. One engine is real noisy & I'm sure there's fibres in there that I didn't find. Next time.

 

[railfan]

Think about how much cat hair is in the environment......I can't fathom how our super fragile, ultra vulnerable, ever so feeble environment could survive under such amounts of toxic material....weighing down on it with such tremendous crushing mega-tonnage. I mean some would say an eggshell is fragile....right? But compared to our tender sensitive environment.....an eggshell is like foot thick steel plate with an extra tough layer of super protective titatium honeycomb sub-matrix. We all better stay indoors with the power off for awhile.


Mike

 

[Railrunner130]

I found plastic containers at Home Depot for $1.17 or something like that. They are labelled "Shoebox". I bought them because I felt plastic parts bins were too expensive. As I've been using them, I realized they stack easy, keep out the dust and, I imagine they also keep out the hair. They are compact enough to travel with, but bubble wrap should be used to prevent damage.

 

[Larry]

I found plastic containers at Home Depot for $1.17 or something like that. They are labelled "Shoebox". I bought them because I felt plastic parts bins were too expensive. As I've been using them, I realized they stack easy, keep out the dust and, I imagine they also keep out the hair. They are compact enough to travel with, but bubble wrap should be used to prevent damage.

You can get those same boxes at Dollar Tree, but, they don't keep out the cat hair when you are running them on your layout. Running is what sucks in the hair & wraps it around all the shafts, not sitting on the layout w/nothing to do.

 

[RW&C]

Yup... with two cats and two dogs, I get this a lot. Not with trains (haven't done much with them lately), but I've had wheels come off of R/C cars from hair buildup... and it makes painting a little nerve-wracking.

 

[Lionel fan]

I've got two dogs that shed constantly, but they stay out of the train room.

My uncle makes his annual Christmas village under the Christmas tree and he uses cotton batting for snow. His engine (Lionel) stopped working, so he gave it to me to fix. There was so much cotton stuck in everything, even his car trucks, that it burnt up the transistors on the circuit board in the engine from the load on it. Needed a thorough cleaning and a new circuit board for 10 bucks. Runs great now.

 

[Graff]

I serviced a Trix Big Boy a few years back for a client, there were two issues with it;
Firstly the cat had pushed it over the layouts edge, making all sorts of damage to it, including breaking the very intricate short coupler between loco and tender.
And secondly it had cat hair EVERYWHERE!
The physical damage was hard enough to fix but the cat hair took the longest to clean out!
All in all it cost the client $150 incl. parts to get it fixed, but if it hadn't been infested with all that hair, it would have been under half of that.....