conductivity Archives - The Silicon Underground

How does a Lionel e-unit work?

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 15 May 2020 11:00:18 +0000

The Lionel e-unit was a wonder of ingenuity in the 1930s. But how does a Lionel e-unit work? Open-frame electric motors like the ones Lionel used in its glory days have two major parts: a field and an armature. Both of them

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Cleaning NES games and consoles

Dave Farquhar — Sun, 15 Jul 2018 11:00:15 +0000

Anyone old enough to have played with an original Nintendo NES knows the problem: You plug in the cartridge, turn on the system, and get a blank screen and the power light blinks at you. The schoolyard fix is to take

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Fix bathroom light bulb flickering

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 12:00:40 +0000

Flickering lights can be a sign of a serious electrical problem. But bathroom light bulb flickering often is due to other issues. Let’s look at things that cause bathroom light bulbs to flicker and burn out more quickly than elsewhere

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Repair a Lionel train motor

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 14 Feb 2017 12:00:46 +0000

If you want to fix a Lionel train, what you probably really need to do is repair a Lionel train motor. There isn’t much to the rest of the train. The motors tend to be pretty rugged and they’ve held

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How to avoid cleaning Lionel track

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 13 Jan 2017 12:00:37 +0000

For some people, the only enjoyable part of cleaning Lionel track is arguing about how to do it. The rest of us don’t even enjoy that part. Recently I unearthed a decades-old secret that mostly eliminates the need to clean

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How to lubricate a Marx motor

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 06 Apr 2016 11:00:34 +0000

I found a video titled How to Lubricate with Labelle, and I thought I would elaborate on how to adapt Labelle’s advice to Marx trains. You don’t have to use Labelle oil and grease necessarily, though I do like their

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How to install American Flyer track locks

Dave Farquhar — Mon, 14 Mar 2016 11:00:02 +0000

To held tracks hold together without nailing them down permanently, AC Gilbert marketed its #694 track locks. Sometimes people also call these track clips. The locks are u-shaped pieces of tin that came in a brown envelope with instructions on the front. If you’ve

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Replace Lionel O gauge track pins with nails

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 13 Nov 2015 11:00:59 +0000

Here’s a question that came in recently: Can you replace Lionel O gauge track pins with nails? Yes, but with a caveat. The factory pins have an indentation in them that help to lock track sections together that nails don’t

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CFL bulbs burn out quickly? Here’s what to do.

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 23 Jan 2014 11:00:19 +0000

I’ve been hearing a lot of complaints about CFL bulbs lately. I’ve written about how to address premature CFL burnout before, but I guess it bears repeating. It’s a five-minute fix, usually, to get the bulbs to last a while.

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Fight voltage drop with copper anti-seize lubricant

Dave Farquhar — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 20:10:23 +0000

If you have issues with your trains slowing down on the far reaches of your layout–and judging from my website hits, many people do–there are a couple of things to do about it. The first thing is to run additional

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