I built the Emerald Night a while ago and it has sat in the box down in my basement ever since. It is a beautiful train although it really does need additional passenger cars. A month ago when I had the e-mail dialog with my Dad about the Emerald Night, he asked me how it be converted to use a 9v motor (since he has several of them). I know the Emerald Night comes with instructions on how to add a Power Function motor but (a) neither of us have the right motor and (b) neither of us feel like buying more motors when we already have 9v motors on hand.
I thought about it a bit and decided trying to stuff a 9v motor in the locomotive was a fools errand. However, adding one to the tender looked pretty straight forward. I decided to poke around a bit and there is thread on LUGNET and a number of blog posts that describe various solutions to the problem. The LUGNET thread in particular is pretty involved and uses a gutted 9v motor along with Power Functions. A bit more than I am willing to take on right now although I do have several dead 9v motors. From further searching it appears there are a number of solutions depending on how close you want it the train to look compared to standard instrcutions. I am not too picky, I just want it work and not look awkward.
There was an NCLUG meeting this past Sunday afternoon and I decided to take a loop of 9v track and the Emerald Night along with some parts with me to see if I could make it run. The key to my idea was to add a single wheel set and a 9v motor to the tender. Doing this meant tweaking the chassis design of the tender a bit to account for the pin on the 9v motor. The modification is pretty simple and makes use of some standard size black plates. I have documented the changes to the tender chassis and produced instructions using Lpub. The instructions for the tender are not complete – they just replace steps 1-5 and eliminate steps 16-18 in the official instructions.
So does it work? Sort of. I say sort of because the modifications to the tender work fine however the tender struggles to push the locomotive through the curves on the small loop. I think this is due to the large train wheels on the locomotive which are linked together via Technic axels to bind up.
Unfortunately I didn’t have any parts with me that I could use to swap out the axels for simple pins which I hope will solve the problem. I hope to try this in the next day or two as I want to run the Emerald Night at LEGOPalooza.
Instructions
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9v 10194 Tender 2010-01-25 - downloaded 128 times My take on converting the 10194 to 9v by motorizing the tender. |
7 Comments
are all the pecies required to do this in the set?
No, unfortunately not. You’ll have to use a few black plates from your LEGO collection.
other than that are the pieces there
You will need some black plates from your own collection to build the modified tender. Not many through.
Hi Mike
Did you ever try out your idea of replacing the axels with smooth pins to reduce friction? How would that work, anyway? I don’t know of any smooth pins that would still have the crosshair style connections on the end required for connecting to the large wheels.
I’ve tried various mods to eliminate friction and run this train with on 9v motor in the tender (similar to your design), but the train crawls at best, unless i add some weight to the tender. These include eliminating friction caused by the piston rods in the front, disconnecting the gears, and even trying a 90 degree offset of the wheel assemblies instead of the 45 degree offset mentioned in the original instructions, but none of these mods has really helped.
Any other ideas?
I have not done any more work on it – my compelling event, LEGO Palooza, was rescheduled due to some unusual winter weather we had here. I expect to get back to it in the next month or so, I will post an update as soon as I can.
Thanks for your response, Mike. Hope you have a great time with LEGO Palooza.
It finally dawned on me what you meant about smooth pins anyway, using the same little pins that connect most of the other non-powered wheels on the train (duh). For some reason i was picturing smooth axels that went all the way through like the current axels do, but now that i understand i may try out and let you know how it goes.
Looking forward to seeing what you figure out once you find the time to dig in.
Ciao for now.
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