Lionel Challenger Woes?

[aartlib]

Just bought a new Lionel Challenger/HO. Just read a review by Tony"s Train Exchange that the rods and crossheads bind. Anybody familiar with this? Any answers if this is true?
Art Gordon-Arizona

[AggroJones]

Here are some threads on it. Even with much tuning, mine still don't run well.

http://www.trains.com/community/forum/topic.asp?page=-1&TOPIC_ID=24022&REPLY_ID=233537#233537

http://www.trains.com/community/forum/topic.asp?page=-1&TOPIC_ID=23635&REPLY_ID=234932#234932

http://www.trains.com/community/forum/topic.asp?page=-1&TOPIC_ID=10314&REPLY_ID=232461#232461

http://www.trains.com/community/forum/topic.asp?page=-1&TOPIC_ID=23340&REPLY_ID=228493#228493

[Anonymous]

Welcome Aboard. I'm an Athearn Challenger.
Good luck

[nfmisso]

Art;

Tony's is an incredibly reliable source for information.

Now that you have the best HO scale Challenger sound system, maybe you should get the Athearn Challenger to put it into.........

[cacole]

I have one of the first Lionel HO Challengers that was released and I have had no problems with it at all. I can't understand how Lionel could have released a second batch that had problems unless they came from a different source.

My only complaint with it is how drastically the price dropped after Lionel announced that they were discontinuing it. So much for being the first kid on the block with a new toy.... My only consolation is that I never paid MSRP for it.

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by aartlib

Just bought a new Lionel Challenger/HO. Just read a review by Tony"s Train Exchange that the rods and crossheads bind. Anybody familiar with this? Any answers if this is true?
Art Gordon-Arizona

Probably not all of the Lionel Challengers had major binds, but mine did.

I purchased one of the first Lionel Challenger and it did bind up and would not run at slow speeds. The screw holding the front rod onto the front driver would catch on the inside of the laird slide for the piston rod. I removed the screw and filed it down a few thousands and filed the inside of the slide and all was good after that. This was a common problem, but who knows if all of them had that problem.

The other problem, which was much harder to fix, was the main drive gear on the front set of engines. That one was out of round and caused the engine to bind up but just messed up the slow running. The gear had to be made round so it did actually bottom out into the worm gear.

It was not easy to fix and don't try this at home. Each engine had little problems, but I ran my engine on the rollers for about 20 hours after I made the adjustments, and it does run well now.

One of my friend's engine ran so bad and when he was running it on a long test track and it went on the floor. No, it did not run any better, but he felt better.
That was when they first came out, and Lionel replaced the engine. The second one ran poorly also, but I have seen some that run good. .

Good Luck with the work .