On30 Climax not running

[Peter Webster]

My On 30 Climax has stopped running, it's not a gear issue, and I think the electrical feed to the motor is faulty. The motor is totally silent and the track is clean, all my other model run ok but this Climax is just dead on the track. The model is way out of warranty. Can anyone offer a good place to start. 

[Fred Klein]

Peter,

To verify whether or not the electrical feed is bad, take a 9V battery and connect a wire to each terminal (I keep an old 9V connector around for just that purpose). Then, touch one wire to one side of the electrical contact on the motor and the other wire to the other side. The motor should turn, probably not very fast but all you're looking for is whether or not the motor works OK. This way, you have bypassed all of the electronics and electrical pickup of the locomotive. The 9V battery should not cause any problems with the electronics, especially if this is a DC locomotive. I've used this method on both DC and DCC engines and have not encountered any problems. If the motor runs, you then have a known starting point and you can work your way back with the wires and touch them to the electrical pickups in the wheels, for instance, however this will not work with a DCC only decoder. Hope this helps.

[Peter Webster]

Fred,
        On further examination I noticed a loose wire going to the pc board that takes the 8 pin dcc plug. I have noticed it appears to have come from one side of the yellow capacitor that sits at the end of the 8 pin socket. I will join this tomorrow and see if it makes any difference. I also noticed that the 2 leads coming from the rear light fitting have come away from the board. I am not impressed with their standard of soldering on this particular loco. Do you have any idea where these are connected to on the pc board or where I can get this information.
Thanks
Peter

[Fred Klein]

Peter,

I don't own an On30 Climax, so I can't say where the loose wire was connected. However, if the engine is DCC, the wiring should follow the NMRA standard and if you browse their website, you should find their wiring specifications. As far as I know, all of their wires connect to the NMRA-standard 8-pin plug, not to any capacitor. Hope this helps.

[dutchbuilder]

Be aware that Mr.B doesn't always follow the NMRA colours on their motherboards.
You will have to do some backward engineering by measuring the wire paths from the decoder.

Ton

[Peter Webster]

The loose wire is from the PC Board, not the DCC decoder and I think I have found where it came off. The main problem now is where does the 2 wires from the rear light connect to on this pc board, nothing to do with the dcc decoder.