My best suggestion is to find another model to cannibalize, and take the motor from that. Are you sure the motors are burned out? There's a good article on zscale.org about resuscitating z scale locos.

Edited by user 01 March 2026 17:06:53(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

I'm curious how you managed to fry three in a row?

By your own admission about your 'learning curve' it seems you are aware that you may have done something wrong.

I can only imagne either the motor was stalled while power remained present, causing overheating and buring out of the winding, or, excess voltage above the 8-12v DC recommended.

Seems there's been a bit of variation with 10v DC becoming a defacto standard. Märklin shipped many starter sets with a controller that required only a 9v battery.

One advantage when testing etc is that by using a battery, your chances of high current drain are reduced, compared to a mains-powered contrller where rather high currents are possible in a dead-short.

Do you know for sure, or have a good idea what damaged your three?

Have you sent them to off to a specialist armature rewinding company?

Welcome to the forum by the way.

Steve

Thank you, cookie & Chas. Much appreciated!

I am aware of zscale.org, which is kinda how I screwed up my first locomotive. These engines are all at least 30 years old, so even NOS might be subject to congealed lubricant. The first engine was sort of pokey in performance. Following zscale's instructions, I carefully removed the bottom pan of the locomotive, put in a few drops of Labelle 108, reassembled the pan assembly, and then discovered one of the brushes had migrated to the outside of one of the wheels.

In trying to get it back in position, several driving wheels and their respective paired gears came out. zscale.org states: "Be very careful when doing this, as those tiny gears and wheels like to leap out. The copper contacts that touch some or all of wheels are spring-loaded; if you are dumb enough to remove one of those wheelsets (I speak from experience), you'll need to pinch the copper contacts against the chassis". After an attempt to stuff things in as accurately as I could, I decided I was over my head and packed it up to send it to Eurotrains in Stockton, CA.

Before I could mail the locomotive up to Eurotrains, I quickly burned out my two other engines through stupidity. I have a double-track setup in my office and had the trains running at low speed. I left the office for the day and forgot to turn off the controller. Apparently, both engines stalled and got their armatures toasted (I watched a YouTube video about the cardinal rules for model trains, the first being not to run trains unless you are there watching them). So those two locomotive got packed up with the first one and I shipped them all to Eurotrains for service.

Trial and error. And dumb mistakes. And maybe I'll learn a few things.

Snap.