Subject:
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Re: Brand new defective train motors - Lego Consumerservice
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.lego, lugnet.trains
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Date:
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Thu, 4 Aug 2005 18:50:47 GMT
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Viewed:
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550 times
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In lugnet.lego, Ludo Soete wrote:
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... I do have now 2 bad motors among those 10.
One is working but when running, gives a screaming noise to get cold chils in
your backbone. ... This motor hasn’t run anymore. The second problem
motor received i recently. This one is death, won’t run at all.
So, today, i called the LEGO Consumerservice (for Belgium), and wanted to be
honest, so i told the lady on the phone that i bought those motors through
Bricklink. The lady told me that she could do notthing for me, because i
bought them through Bricklink, ant not at LEGO straight away.
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Ludo-
A few comments:
1. I have a lot newly acquired experience in servicing LEGO train motors since
we switched SCLTC to DCC. Before DCC, when a motor went bad, we would only
retire it from service. Now, we take perfectly good motors apart to install
decoders and bad motors apart to find out what went wrong.
We’ve been pleasantly surprised to discover that we actually had zero dead
motors! In only 1 case did we have problem with the actual motor, and even that
one worked (for a while) when the shaft was spun manually. So, it seams our
theory that motors could die from stalling and overheating was not true.
(Good!).
The main culprit is the the spring contacts that link the motor to the turning
wheels. These tend to weaken, crack, and break off. They are the number one
cause of the screeching. Since there’s no such thing as a replacement part, we
have repaired motor units by removing the unbroken contacts from one and placing
them in another. We also carefully bend the contacts outward if necessary to
maintain contact. I’ve taken to applying graphite powder to the contacts at the
wheels, but I’ve read that there may be better conducting lubricants
(Conductalube) available. Between the spring replacements and lubrication, the
squeeking has largely gone away.
We also select the best performing motors when we have to scavenge contacts from
multiple units. We rate the motors by running them on a closed circle for 20
laps in both directions. Over 30 seconds we retire, under 27 seconds we use for
our most demanding applications. The rest are main stream good.
2. TLC in the US has always replaced (what we used to call) dead or poor
performing motors for us. Granted, I usually identified myself as a member of an
LTC what had just run a 3, 10, or 12 week show, but I’ve also always had good
luck with US Customer Service. When people complain that LEGO is expensive, I
usually site both the long term reusability and the superior customer service.
-Ted Michon
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