All of the carriages need to have the couplings trimmed like this for smooth operation I haven't taken any progress photos of the other two engines which were modded earlier Murdoch and Thomas were both originally powered by a single AA battery, and Duck was originally powered by a single C battery, which all got boring pretty quickly. Duck only needed a single cut to remove a bit of plastic behind the battery clip Thomas needed some soldering and plastic welding, and lucky that he's got a taller gear ratio, as only two AAA's can fit in him Murdoch was a bit more work than expected Modding thomas the tank engine toys is cheesecake
Derailment. Reminds me of why none of my childhood toys have any resale value. Those motors can handle a 9 volt, BTW.
I forgot to mention that bit Bigsharn The speed increases are about the same as the volt increases, which are about 2.5x for Duck & Murdoch, and close to double for Thomas, but since Thomas has a taller drive ratio, they all run at similar speeds. You can see an internal spring which has been trimmed. This was to reduce friction, as that spring disengages the drive gears when it's turned off, and the spring was a couple of mm longer than neccessary, and was causing Murdoch to be the slowest one. Duck was the only one that would occasionally derail, so I shoved some blu tak inside the receses of the water tanks/rectangular sides with the GWR stickers, and that little bit of weight was enough to keep him on the tracks. Do you miss modding toys Cheapskate? Then it might be time to start having kids
Ah, cool beans I'm glad I had the die-cast metal ones, which never had motors in, so thankfully I could sell them all
i can remember modding my scalextric cars. They didn't last very much longer after i modded them however.
I remeber hooking up my slot cars to a 12v train set power supply They would spin out far too easily on the corners, so I'd put a coating of glue, from a soft paper/craft glue stick = super fast cornering, and then nice drifitng as the glue would wear away They had the same little motors as these trains, and since we didn't play with them that much, it took a while before the little copper brushes had melted away so much that they needed a little bend to make good contact again