Bachmann 2-8-4 Berkshire/Kanawha in stock at M.B. Klein

[jdcolombo]

I'm totally with you here. If I was modeling NKP I'd be doing everything to make it work.

(I meant no disrespect)

Mark

No, no, no - never interpreted your views as disrespect.  Just the opposite - I'm normally as picky about slow-speed performance as you or anyone.  I had very high hopes for the Berk after getting a couple of EM-1's (which often showed up in and around Bellevue hauling coal to the Huron docks).   I guess I should have known that the non-Spectrum units wouldn't be as good.  Now I'm trying to come to terms with the "OK, but not great" performance level.  They'll be fine hauling CB10 down the mainline with 25 reefers behind them at 60 mph; I won't use them for switching duties .

John C.

[victor miranda]

the slow speed you seek...
if yours and mine are similar...
is found in the tender pick-ups.

more weight...
and probably solder wires to the truck pick-up thumbs.

mine hiccups at slow speeds and then resets.
classic slow speed stall.
the little flywheel keeps it from a complete stall.

victor

[SkipGear]

I will agree with Victor on this one. Both of mine needed the wire contacts in the drawbar connection to the loco adjusted. In shipping it looked like they had been bent outward and were not touching. I realize that there is a wire conection between the loco and tender but for some reason things always seem to work better when the drawbar connection is also working correctly.

[mmagliaro]

I think Victor is talking about  pressure strips
soldered to the board inside the tender are supposed to make contact with the fingers that come up through the floor from the tender trucks.  Wasn't there a post somewhere showing one of those fingers inside the Berkshire tender bent up in the air so it didn't touch the truck finger?  I cannot find it now.

Flip the engine on its back and make sure you can run it with clip leads on each pair of tender wheels.
If you can't, but you can run it on some pairs, then at least on its back, the drawbar is working but some of the tender wheels are not, and I would suspect those contact fingers inside the tender.

[victor miranda]

Then, I found that one of the tender pickups is bent up too high, so that the rear tender truck will lose contact when it pivots:

max,
this photo?

when I saw that picture and what it means....
lets go with I ma not pleased.  this design is a BIIIG problem.

victor

[SkipGear]

I think Victor is talking about  pressure strips
soldered to the board inside the tender are supposed to make contact with the fingers that come up through the floor from the tender trucks.  Wasn't there a post somewhere showing one of those fingers inside the Berkshire tender bent up in the air so it didn't touch the truck finger?  I cannot find it now.

Flip the engine on its back and make sure you can run it with clip leads on each pair of tender wheels.
If you can't, but you can run it on some pairs, then at least on its back, the drawbar is working but some of the tender wheels are not, and I would suspect those contact fingers inside the tender.

The inside tabs are certainly a problem too. Just noting that my drawbar connection was not the best either. The drawbar connection can hep circumvent the issue with the pickups on the tender board, at least for the front truck because the power then gets routed through the loco frame and back to the decoder. One connection backs up the other and the drawbar is a much easier fix for those not inclined to take things apart.

[victor miranda]

the drawbar needs fixing?

oooof, I 'll have to look.  I am still a bit busy so it may be next weekend.

I expect the drawbar contacts to the front tender truck.
if that is the case....
the thumbs up from the front truck are even more important.

To get contact from the engine, the tabs in the tender have to touch the thumbs.
 
looks like the fix for sound is the same as the fix for smooth slow speeds.

 

[peteski]

max,
this photo?

when I saw that picture and what it means....
lets go with I ma not pleased.  this design is a BIIIG problem.

victor

Um, very short (and due to that, rather stiff) contact springs.   Just like they used in Acela. Not good! 

[Chris333]

Keeping in mind that I cut all the tender electronics out of mine and wired the motor direct to the frame sides and I'm using a different Bachmann tender. It still feels like the tender isn't doing much for pick-ups. I haven't had much time to play with it.

Really I sort of regret buying it. Figured it would be a quick and easy Berkshire. But I get to toss $100 in circuit boards. The boiler is metal so I can't easily change it. Valve gear looks like crap.

Seriously before I saw all the stuff wrong with my LL berk and now I see everything that is good about it.

[victor miranda]

Hi Cris333

what were you aiming at?

I am pretty sure you can sell the tender and sound unit and get
well, more than 50 anyway....

I looked at the berk and decided it looked good
it ran ok... and the limp looked like it was in the gears

I am not sure that the b-mann unit is a clear winner over the LL unit.
... I guess this is where I mention that my two do not run.
motor fails, I think, and I have not gone looking.

off hand, the b-mann is better from the pick-ups.
and until b-mann can get the rest of their quality control in hand
they are not going to see much benefit from using a coreless motor.

more or less I can see a diamond in the b-mann berk and I am not sure
how one can get that roughness polished up.

I would be very tempted to see if the b-mann trucks can go into
ll berk with little fuss.
cause I think that would be a good start.

.... that will be an expensive marriage however.

victor

[sizemore]

You're better off just marrying the Bachmann Berk tender to the Wally Berk mechanism. Then mock the LL shell to the tender floor to maintain detail relief (already explored the option ). There would be little modification as the draw bars line up very close, just need the pin that holds the drawbar inserted. Then just run a new wiring harness from the locomotive. The problem I had was that I could tell the Bachmann trucks a MILE away (since the treads are 6 lanes wide). 

As for the gyralight, you can get the FEF3 glass set which has a gyralight (albeit the lens is red). I am already cooking up Super-Berk 2.0, learning from my mistakes with the first.

The S.

[mmagliaro]

Hi Cris333

what were you aiming at?

I am pretty sure you can sell the tender and sound unit and get
well, more than 50 anyway....

I looked at the berk and decided it looked good
it ran ok... and the limp looked like it was in the gears

I am not sure that the b-mann unit is a clear winner over the LL unit.
... I guess this is where I mention that my two do not run.
motor fails, I think, and I have not gone looking.

off hand, the b-mann is better from the pick-ups.
and until b-mann can get the rest of their quality control in hand
they are not going to see much benefit from using a coreless motor.

more or less I can see a diamond in the b-mann berk and I am not sure
how one can get that roughness polished up.

I would be very tempted to see if the b-mann trucks can go into
ll berk with little fuss.
cause I think that would be a good start.

.... that will be an expensive marriage however.

victor

An interesting chain of thinking, Victor.
And now (thread drift ensues)... with all the discussion about this Berkshire, I dug out my LL model
and started playing with it.   Boy, I don't know.  It is an awfully good looking and good running engine.
It can run steady  at 3 mph.  It can creep much slower than that.

I don't have a Bachmann sample here to place side-by-side, but I will soon.  In photos, I still give the nod to the LL for looks.

Yes, the LL had issues, but once I added some weight and cut a groove for a traction tire, it pulled great.   My tender is like the later runs with two conducting trucks, and I added weight to the tender.  The pickup is very steady.

The reason I say all this is that, sure, if the Bachmann rolled out of the box and just worked, it would be
worth a premium price and having DCC and sound already built in would be a plus for people who want it.
But it doesn't look to me from reading in here that it rolls out of the box that way.  It has quartering problems.  It has pickup problems.  And then I look at those tender contact fingers and think I'd rather have the LL tender even though it's not axle-point.

I saw a comment earlier in this thread where someone said if they were modeling the NKP in the 1950s, they would do whatever they had to to make the Bachmann engine work.  I am not sure about that.  I would probably buy up LL Berks and do whatever I had to to make those work.

Where I'm heading with this is, if I had to put some effort into fixing up the engine, which engine will
give me the best final result when I'm done?

The LL runs so nice that I am really bummed that nothing in the NP/SP&S arena looked anything like it, so it's a very pretty engine that I can't really use.

[jdcolombo]

Hi Max.

So here's the problem.  Not all of us can cut grooves for an after-market traction tire.  That takes a lathe, which I don't have, and am not really interested in spending $700 on one for this one project.  I have several LL Berks (10, to be exact) on my NKP layout set in 1957.  I've solved much of the pulling power problem by using double-sided tape on the #3 driver, but that doesn't solve the tendency of the LL Berk to lift the front drivers when going around a curve under load.   And adding the tape reduces the electrical pickup on the engine, which in turn means that I'm relying mostly on the tender for electrical pickup, and the tender pickup is . . . lousy, because it's not the proven conductive cup design used by Kato or, now, Bachmann.  It more or less works most of the time, but I don't have ANY electrical pickup problems with my Bachmann units.  They are rock solid on that front (I have bent the drawbar wires in so that they contact the post better). 

I like my LL Berks.  They look great, and run at less-than-tie-creep speed.   But I've done just as much work to get THEM to perform at an acceptable level as I have the Bachmann.   I do wish I could have bought the Bachmann's without a sound option for $100 less, so that then I could have installed my own sound system.  But at the end of the day, the two are about equal in terms of the amount of effort needed to get them to an acceptable running level.  Neither is very useful out of the box.   The LL Berk will pull 6 cars; has no sound; and a lousy tender pickup system.   The Bachmann Berk pulls well, has adequate detailing, and a great tender truck pickup system, but has "hitch" issues and mostly bad very-slow-speed performance.   I'm not at all sure that one beats the other; both need a LOT of TLC to run how I expect a modern N-scale offering to run. 

I really, really wish Kato had taken an interest in the Berkshire . . .

John C.

[sizemore]

Hi Max.

So here's the problem.  Not all of us can cut grooves for an after-market traction tire.  That takes a lathe, which I don't have, and am not really interested in spending $700 on one for this one project.  I have several LL Berks (10, to be exact) on my NKP layout set in 1957.  I've solved much of the pulling power problem by using double-sided tape on the #3 driver, but that doesn't solve the tendency of the LL Berk to lift the front drivers when going around a curve under load. 

John C.

There are multiple folks here that would probably cut all the wheelsets you have for little or no cost that's how I got my three. That's the beauty of the Railwire fellow rivet counters and perfectionists that don't mind sharing time and skill. Or a little lathe time.

As for the weight in the front, add tungsten like Chris/Max did and she'll pull more and not climb the rails.

The S.

[mmagliaro]

John,

I completely understand your position (and everybody else who is frustrated with the LL engine).
Now that I look over the issues, I realize that I probably see this differently, because I can
make mods to my LL Berk that most people would never do.

But since the double-sided tape has solved your traction problem, the following "short list" may help you a
lot.

My "short list" on the LL Berk is to :

- add the second tender pickup truck if you don't have one,
and add weight to the tender.  (If you have 10 useless LL Berks sitting around, you may as well
cannibalize a tender truck out of 5 of them to make the other 5 run with full-pickup tenders).  Then, you
scour around until dead ones show up to steal their trucks, or the Bachmann Berk tender becomes available as
a separate part, etc.  With two live trucks and 15g of added weight in my tender, the pickup is rock
solid.  No, it is not axle-point pickup.  It is the older-style all-wheel pickup with the plates riding in grooves
behind each wheel like the ConCor/Kato Hudson.  But with some weight, it works.

- Pop the smokebox front and stuff as many tungsten disks in there as you can

- Take off the pilot truck, and glue lots of tungsten disks up above there to the bottom of
the underside of the engine.

I was able to add 10 grams of extra weight to the nose by doing this, and that nose ain't going anywhere.

Years ago, when I got my LL Berk, I did the above and that solved all the pickup and front-end lifting
problems.  And remember, I had cut my driver so I could pull 40 cars with it on level track, and the front
end still doesn't lift.

The one remaining biggie is converting to DCC.
To isolate the motor, you have to take the whole darn engine apart down to the frames to
get the motor out, put some Kapton tape on it so it's terminals aren't  touching the frame anymore,
solder leads to the motor terminals that you can route out the back to a decoder in the tender,
and then reassemble.