As some may know, I ruined the commutator on one of my postwar F3 motors. A new commutator installed is rumored to run upwards of $60 in which a new motor just makes more sense. HOWEVER, if you can find a different used lionel armature assembly that uses the same diameter disc style commutator, you can swap them out with little difficulty. This is not the case with segment style prewar commutators. In this case I assume you would want an entire rewind and new com installed and money will not be an issue as it is prewar stuff.........
If you buy a worm drive armature that will not fit the F3 motor for instance, all you have to do is unsolder the winding wire from the copper plates (3), wrap a flat screw driver with electrical tape, simply pry up slightly on the commutator equally around until it breaks loose from the windings. Then twist and pull up. It will slide off the shaft. You then will swap it over, apply some glue to the shaft and to the bottom felt insulator, apply some flux and resolder the wires to the new commutator. File down any humps of solder and you are all set. Allow your glue to dry as specified. After it is dry you can choose to mount the armature shaft into a drill or drill press and resand flat your commutator.
I was able to do this on my bad armature, I removed and reinstalled the same broken commutator just as an experiment being someone was nice enough to offer me a new motor. I just wanted to try it out first on a bad armature to see if it could be done. Amazingly it was successful. Finding just a disc commutator is probably going to be impossible. Themotordoctor probably will not just sell you a commutator.
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