Hi, all ... building my first HO layout. I inherited my Mom and Dad's HO stuff that I grew up with, after Mom cleaned out the basement One of the locos I inherited is a Santa Fe 5628 engine. I love this engine, but the motor has long since died (it's gotta be 45 years old!). I'm having a hard time letting it go. Would it be a fool's errand to put the shell on a new chassis? I found a Kato EMD SD40/45 powered chassis and wondered if this would work. Does anyone have any thoughts? Many thanks!
You ought to be able to swap shells and drives pretty freely. You may have to drill and tap some screwholes, or file some stuff away for clearance, make some slots to accept lugs, but all this is quite doable. This ought to work for shells and drives of the same locomotive, say an SD40 shell onto an SD40 drive. You do want to check over all length of drive or shell, if the replacement drive is longer or shorter than the original, it's gonna be harder to get everything to fit right.
David Starr www.newsnorthwoods.blogspot.com
Doing a search for your Santa Fe, it looks like you have the Tyco, Santa Fe GP20. The Kato SD45 will be a lot longer.
I think you need to find a powered chassie that is the same length, with the 2 axle trucks. Yours would be like GP9 or 7 or a GP18. Walthers sells a GP20 in their Trainline series. The SD45 has 3 axle trucks, and much longer.
Mike.
My You Tube
Some shell/power chassis swap-outs are easy but the Mantua/Tyco GP20 had a very proprietary frame and power chassis making the conversion a bit of a challenge even if the new plastic frame has the correct wheelbase. Mont Switzer showed how to do it in a January 1993 issue of Mainline Modeler (no longer published).
A new motor could also be a challenge given the proprietary mounting system Mantua used. Those GP20s are seen so often at swap meets, maybe better and cheaper to buy an engine that runs at such a swap meet and just swap out the plastic shell with your old favorite. If the prior owner converted to frame or body mounted couplers you could still have some work to do to use your shell.
Dave Nelson
if it is a mantua/tyco gp20 and (this is a big if) you can find a proto power west chassis, the number on the box is 55519, the mantua gp 20 shell should slip right on. I picked up one a long time ago I believe on ebay.
Motors and be replaced. You will also have to replace the drive train .
So start at the trucks and look at the drive shaft. This will remain, everything else goes. NWSL recommends buying the largest motor and flywheel that will fit in the remaining space.
with negative on the left side and positive on the right, the locomotive will run forward. Be sure that this is so so that your locomotive will play nicely with the rest of your fleet.
LION has been remotoring many power cars for the subway of him, it is not all that hard. If a LION can do it ewe can too.
ROAR
The Route of the Broadway Lion The Largest Subway Layout in North Dakota.
Here there be cats. LIONS with CAMERAS
Thanks for tracking that down! I was already headed down the wrong path. Much appreciated!
I'm definitely intrigued by this idea of finding a chassis or just an old Mantua/Tyco GP20 on ebay. Thanks so much for the suggestions!
Another thought is to see what's wrong with it and fix it. Tyco has a bit of a bad rap from some of their later stuff (the famous "vampire trucks") but there are a couple things that might be a real easy fix. Check out these Tyco forums, they have a couple great posts on repairing both red box and brown box locomotives, and it's not as difficult as you might think.
http://tycodepot.com/
http://www.tycoforums.com/tyco/forum/default.asp
I had a couple of Tyco Alcos with the same motor set-up, a C-430 and a C-630, and while they looked pretty-good with some added details and decent paint jobs, they were never very good runners. If you can't find what you need to get it running, you could simply remove the motor, then use it as a dummy with a better-running locomotive.If you're running DCC, you could then probably use its empty body shell for housing the speakers if you want sound.
Wayne