Sound like the way I get my BLI engines!
While you have the trucks apart, get some Pearl White Tooth Paste and run it in the gears. Will polish the gears so they need less power and are quieter to boot!
Here is a link about it.
http://www.mcor-nmra.org/Publications/Articles/Athearn_TuneUp.html
I know it is about Athearn engines, but when you get right down to it every engine made to day is a knock off of a Athearn.
Cuda Ken
I hate Rust
Before I disassembled the wheels and gears, I swapped decoders just to make sure it wasn't a decoder issue - it wasn't. I pulled apart the gears and noticed that there was no oil/grease on them. I've thrown wheels and gears into soapy water and will dry off completely. I will then throw on a couple of pea size drops of plastic friendly grease on the gears, a drop of oil on the ends of the wheels and give it a whirl. I will let you know how it works out.
I didn't realize this - thanks for pointing it out - but I don't think this is the issue given that I reset the decoder and it performed the same....
The DH165LO supports the "switching speed" function. It is controlled by CV 54 (The factory default is OFF). When turned ON F6 toggles it on and off. When ON it cuts the set speed by about 1/2.
Joe
Not sure about that decoder, but I know some decoders have an option where hitting a particular function button turns on "yard speed" which roughly cuts the engines speed in half over the entire speed range. Maybe something like that got turned on??
Thanks. I will give it a go. Taking these P2K engines apart are a pain in the ***. :-)
Did you run the engine before you installed the decoder? Was it OK on DC?
Was this a plug-in decoder installation, or did you wire it yourself? I'd re-check the wiring, although it's hard to think of a mis-wire that would behave that way. Old gunked-up grease would certainly make it do this, so I'd go with David's suggestion first.
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.