I just bought one of these n scale beauties today and assembled the wand as shown in the instructions. I was expecting this to be as simple as operating Rapido cars in HO, but no matter how many times I wave the wand's magnet over the part of the coah as indicated, the light will not turn on. I pulled out the plastic safety, insulating strip as instructed.
What am I doing wrong?
Strangest twist of luck, my brother's cat knocked the car off the table, it took a fall of about 4 ft. When my brother picked up the car (luckily not a scratch or nick on it), he noticed the LED is on. But now it won't turn off when I put the wand over it...
I'm very happy with how the light looks, its a subtle prototypical glow, but I guess the battery won't last long now..
Can you remove the roof to look at the lighting circuit? If it uses a reed switch it can be very picky about the exact orientation of the magnet - the QSI decoders with the reed switch reset act like this too. If you bring the magnet near with the roof off so you cna see the reed switch (a glass oval with a pair of leaf contacts in it) you can see the leaves come together or move apart when the magnet is properly aligned. Of course after a 4 foot fall it might be shattered and no longer workable, but probbaly not. The circuit is probably "close the contacts once, lights on, close them again, lights off" and the fall banged them together so the lights went on and now you're back to the same position as before, the magnet is not activating the contacts so it won't turn off.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
rrinker Can you remove the roof to look at the lighting circuit? If it uses a reed switch it can be very picky about the exact orientation of the magnet - the QSI decoders with the reed switch reset act like this too. If you bring the magnet near with the roof off so you cna see the reed switch (a glass oval with a pair of leaf contacts in it) you can see the leaves come together or move apart when the magnet is properly aligned. Of course after a 4 foot fall it might be shattered and no longer workable, but probbaly not. The circuit is probably "close the contacts once, lights on, close them again, lights off" and the fall banged them together so the lights went on and now you're back to the same position as before, the magnet is not activating the contacts so it won't turn off. --Randy
Thanks, that seems plausible. Tonight I will see how to take the roof off. Unfortunately the instructions with the car are pretty terrible. They tell you how to assemble the magnetic wand, and thats about it. The Kato cars instructions were pretty clear on how to remove the roof, hopefully the intermountain ones work by the same mechanism.
Use a stronger magnet. Sometimes those magnetic wands are too weak. Keep a couple of spare refrigerator magnets handy.