Jouef 141R extra pickups

[RSR Engineer]

Good morning, fellow members.

Quite a number of the locos on my layout are of somewhat advanced years, dating from as far back as the late 1960s. A typical case in point is a Jouef 141R that I found at a local flea market / carboot. Typical Jouef of those days, tender drive (no problem), traction tyres (de rigueur), pickups on just the four wheels of the other bogie. This is a woefully short live wheelbase, totally inadequate for the dead-frog points and slips of the old layout (and thus perforce of part of the new one). As this was also something of a trial balloon, I made do with extra pickups on just one pair of driving wheels, which seems adequate in practice. Also, the work is not quite complete, as I still need to find a decent two-pole miniature plug and socket.

It's all a bit primitive and Heath-Robinson but then I'm no Werner von Siemens, nor am I much good at bending wire accurately.

The work is, as usual, documented and illustrated on flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/188026976 ... 0310022394

Cheers,
Artur

[RSR Engineer]

In addition to the extra pickups, the tender needed a new power bogie chassis, because the gear train was jammed, and the loco needed a new front pony truck, because the wheels of the original one were decidedly out of true and rejoiced in derailing on every point frog (except when I watched it, of course). I was luckily able to obtain spares from a seller on eBay France.

There are a few videos of the 141R in action on flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/188026976 ... 7994476728 (titles in alphabetical order).

Cheers,
Artur

[Aussie 3 railer]

Your not doing to badly with the wire bends. Like your videos as well.

Dirk

[508035]

Hi RSR Engineer

I noticed in some of your pictures that you soldered some phosphor bronze pickup strip to the wire running along the chassis on both sides to allow the leading pair of coupled wheels to collect power. That is what I was going to suggest doing but my suggestion was going to be to fit as many pickups as possible in order to get 6 or even all 8 coupled wheels collecting power, the idea being to get full power collection in place because the more wheels you have picking up power, the better the loco will perform.

I had a number of tender driven hornby locomotives and found that they ran better with extra pickups, however, that was after the base keeper plates had been modified by fully removing the leaf spring detail to allow all the wheels to collect power.

The modifications had to be done because with some hornby steam locomotives generally only 2, 3, 4 or 5 of the coupled wheels ( depending on the class of loco ) actually collect power but by carrying out this modification those numbers can double.

To achieve this, I removed the original hornby pickups and made my own from scratch using single sided copperclad pcb board and phosphor bronze pickup strip. On some of my locos, I had to setup the pickups so that they made contact with the wheel treads instead of the backs of the wheels because due to usage by previous owners or general age of the models, the backs of the wheels became very rough and could rip the pickups to shreads hence the need to set them up to make contact with the wheel treads.

Granted there is more cleaning of the pickups required during maintenance but the extra pickups did help to improve performance. As my track setup became more complex, I found there would then be a need to fit pickups onto the leading coach which would preferably be a parcels coach. The wires from these pickups would then be connected to the tender, in addition to the loco pickups to give power collection over a much longer distance and therefore further improve the performance, the only drawback with this is that the loco and the parcels coach are permanently coupled, a small price to enable good power supply to the motor from the rails but well worth doing.

Hope this helps

[brian1951]

The OPs question was dated July 23, maybe your a bit late.

[508035]

Only found the topic this morning, hadn't seen it before today.

[Walkingthedog]

You have to be careful responding to posts. I once gave some advice to somebody who asked the question 2 years before and hadn’t been seen since.

[Rog (RJ)]

Late answers may be too late to be of help to OPs but can be helpful to others who look in later, so not always a waste.

[RSR Engineer]

Thank you, gentlemen, for your recent comments.

I fought shy of adding more pickups coz the "live wheelbase" of the loco seemed to be long enough. Not being much good at such work, I was glad when she got through the double slips and diamonds in the northern station throat without hesitating. Many of my locos would benefit well from mods like 508035 has been applying. Even models that would normally be regarded as well equipped can suffer from poor current collection. One example is the Rivarossi DB class 39 2-8-2. I had to fit extra pickups to the tender because the wheels were so badly oxidised by arcing. This is a always a danger when all the pickup wheels on one side of the loco are non-driven and "only" roll along the rail. I left the wheels in their oxidised condition to take the attached picture so people could see it. The loco was later sold.

Cheers,
Artur

[508035]

I must admit that 1 of the problems I have experienced before now and read about ( on forums I used to be a member of ) is that often times, the pickups fitted when a model is produced at the factory, can act more like brakes than pickups as they put too mu ch pressure on the wheels and prevent them from turning. Also, I have had cases where the original pickups have worn away much quicker than would be expected and with hornby steam locomotives now having plastic spokes instead of metal spokes, the amount of metal available for making contact with the pickups is frequently insufficient and if the plastic spokes are standing proud of the metal tyres, the pickups either don't make contact with the wheels at all or they get ripped to shreds by the plastic spokes.

My solution has been to get rid of the original pickups ( particularly on the hornby black 5, lay 2 pieces of gapped copperclad board accross the chassis ( after applying a bit of superglue ), apply solder to the copperclad board, bend some suitably sized lengths of phosphor bronze pickup strip into a U shape ( the bottom of the U needs to be flat in order to sit properly on the board ), apply solder to the flattened bottom of each new pickup and solder them onto the board in line with the wheel treads. For locomotives with 3 driving axles, the 2nd axle only needs 1 pickup bearing on its tread and the 1st or 3rd driving wheel has a single pickup which would look like 1/2 of a letter U touching the tread.

As the 2 sets of pickups would separated by a gap along the chassis, they will need to be connected together with more strip as a sort of buss power bar / line to which the motor supply power wires are then connected ( once the polarity has been checked to confirm the locomotive will run the correct direction in accordance with the controllers setting.

Can I also please state for the record that I know there are many members on here who will already know how to do what I have just described. The process described above is for anybody unsure or unfamiliar with that process and is intended as a guide to assist with improving locomotive performance and it is not intended as a way of telling anybody to suck eggs or cause offence to anybody already knowledgeable of this process.

To the moderators : I needed to include the above statement in order to prevent a repetition of a disagreement I got caught up in once on another thread. I described that same process and a few members took offence so by adding that statement, I am simply covering my back to prevent any such occurrence from happening.