Upgrading a Mantua 0-4-0

I made a retainer plate from a piece of PC circuit board, drilled the holes out and fastened it to the engine bottom. This will make installing the wipers much easier.

I drew up four wipers on my cad system. Printed them out and glued them to a piece of .006" thick phosphor bronze sheet. They were then cut out with scissors.

The wipers were bent to shape and soldered on. The front wipers have been soldered on already.

Both front and back wipers installed.

Two holes were drilled so wire could be run into the firebox for hook up later. Hard to see. Just follow the black wires to the left from their solder point on the PC board.

At this point all the hard wiring from the tender and engine have been completed. I temporarily wired it all together for
a test run with DC voltage to look for any problems before installing the decoder and possibly blowing it up the decoder.

Watch as the steamer makes its first run at slow speed through a commercial switch with a dead frog. It does slow down,
but that's because of a tight spot in the frog area. As you watch you'll hear the chant of an Alco T-6 idling in the background.
This is how smooth a 4 wheeled switcher, now with 12-wheel pick-up can run. The can motor also helps a tremendous amount.
Enjoy.

While running the engine backwards very slowly I noticed an oscillation in the motor shaft. It was oscillating back and forth. There looked to be about .030" or more movement back and forth. Here's a picture of how much travel the motor shaft does. This will give some oscillation through the whole drive train giving a small bit of jerkiness while under motion. The only way to cure that would be to open the motor and install washers on the shaft and that's not going to happen with this motor since there's no way of opening it without destroying the motor. Just another point to consider when trouble shooting drives.

A Miniatronics 3mm YELOGLO warm white LED was installed. So, here's what I did. This is the weight that's in the front of the engine and it has the light bulb in it. I haven't figured out what the square block was for over the bulb. The smoke box cover had the cast in headlight and a plastic lens.

That little square block was just sitting on top of the bulb. Talk about antique lighting.

On the bottom you can see where the screw goes into to hold the front end on. Also provided is a nice wire run around the screw hole.

The bulb pops out easy. The plastic lens took a little more effort.