Athearn Genesis SD70MAC runs rough

[Glen1]

Thank you for the replys. I just spoke to a friend of mine who works in a hobby shop. He said that the units built in China are very inconsistent in their quality. Some are great, others never run properly. They've returned a number of them to Athearn. So, I guess the rule is that, whenever possible, test run the engine first. Unfortunately, I trusted them to produce a good model so I didn't bother asking my friend to have the hobby shop test run it for him. I'm going to take the decoder out of it and put it in on consignment. I'm sure someone who wants to install a sound decoder will be happy with it.

[cwclark]

I just purchased an Athearn Genesis SD70MAC and it was one of the best engines I've ever purchased from Athearn ..have had no problems at all with it...chuck

[Anonymous]

I guess at this point exchanging the unit is not an option.

I have a 70MAC that I recently converted to DCC - hardest part is getting the shell off - I removed the handrails and got to tugging on the shell until it released.

These engines have the quick plug - so all you need to do is remove the dummy plug and replace it with the decoder - I used a Digitrax 163 (I don't remember the suffix).

This engine runs quieter than all my other DCC engines (four-all atlas).

[Glen1]

I bought an Athearn Genesis SD75 a couple of years agao and it ran a little rough, but not too badly. I found that it ran better in reverse so I run it that way as a trailing unit. I was sure that I read somewhere that Athearn was aware of the problem and had taken steps to correct it on later production. Recently, a friend of mine was away on a business trip and I asked him to pick up a BNSF SD70MAC for me. He did and it's awful. It's far noisier than the first unit and the wheels appear to be out of round, causing the trucks to wobble. I took the worm gears out and even running the trucks on their own was noisy and felt rough. The gears even locked up intermittantly. I spent hours cleaning flash and doing everything reasonable to do to get them to run smoother. The unit is slightly better, but just barely. The horns were badly bent on the top and needed to be adjusted. The center fan over the radiators wasn't glued properly and the fan inside had fallen off. The steps that lead from the walkway to the rear door on the cab were so badly misaligned that I had to break them off and reposition them. Is this sort of thing typical on these units? Not that it created any problems for me, but there were no instructions regarding DCC decoder installation. I'd heard some disparaging remarks about these units before I got mine but just dismissed them. Personally, I wouldn't buy another one without seeing it out of the box and running it. I just wondered if anyone else has had a similar experience.