One of the scariest things I have ever done was taking apart my Challenger. Whew! Now I can share how to do it with pictures. Pieces! The front engine assembly. Unscrew the teeny tiny little screws on top of the pistons. Unscrew the mount where the front engine connects to the rear section. Then slide the center pipe feed to the slot and you have the front loose (It will be very obvious how how the slot works). The tender. Remove either screw holding it to the engine. Remove the end most two screws on each end. The coupler box too. Then the bottom can be removed. Seen here is the circuit board for the rear light with a feed by fiber optic to the shell. Oh yes... put all the screws back in the same hole you took them from. There are too many different length screws and you would not want to mix them up! On the tender, I put the four screws (the same size) and the coupler box inside the shell. The rear truck on the tender has a feed which comes up into the circuit board. The other two wires feed into the motor.
You still there? Now the fun part. On the front of the driver below the pistons, you will see two screws. Remove. On the very end, below the cab, you will find four screws. These all screw into the cab and hold it on. Important! These are two different length screws! Take out the very back two first and put them aside. Then the other two and keep them to the left of the first two so you know they are not the back two (you know what I mean). The cab has two little wires which hook on to the bottom. Carefully remove them from the slots they feed through and remove the cab. Yes, there is the back of the engine. Now the tricky part. Very carefully lift the whole assembly straight up. The pistons have tubing attached going forward. Two fit inside and the other two have a nub sticking out that the tubing slips onto. The nubs can be seen in the above picture pointing forward. Also notice the eight tiny screws. Two of them did not need to be removed and were replaced back (the motor mounts). The cab and the four holes. The drive. Notice the giant hairs. Well, in this scale...
The rest is pretty simple. The driver wheel feeds and the tender wheel feeds are soldered directly to the back of the motor. This is as far as I got last night. Lots of room for the decoder in the tender. Depending on your options, you could wire the rear light very easily. The front light... there is no front light. But I have ideas... On the D51 Mikado, the headlight was left wired to the track feed, so the headlight is on all the time - which is actually great. My plan is to make some pickups off the front drivers or front guide wheels and wire the headlight to the rail feed to a resistor/LED on the front. No wires should show and the headlight will stay on all the time. The rear light will not be used at all. I am going to use the two (now available) functions of the Z-2 for the red/yellow SM LED firebox illumination. The red will be constant and the yellow will flicker. Just got to get this conversion done before Medford. Well, not the headlight, but the rest. Any comments/suggestions? Now is the time.
Already covered that. Don't really need the back up light. Almost impossible to run wires to the front. Constant headlight is okay. And Jeff made me do this! Or was it Don F.? ZoCal pretty well runs only DCC at our shows so it was going to happen. We have a show in June in Ontario, CA and maybe a July show in Pomona, CA. And I hear voices in my head all the time so I must of missed the "No disassemble" part.
As soon as I know for sure that it runs thru turnouts without shorting, mine will be converted too ! Thanks for being the guinea pig. Now, if I can get mine to show up before I leave on Wednesday morning . . . .
Unsoldered the rear light and the motor wires. The frame on the tender - along with everything else - is metal. I will heat shrink the connections to avoid shorts. The lead weight and the light are held on by simple two sided tape - and is also the insulation. The boiler end. Very detailed. The front "spread-eagled". The piping is from the rear pistons. You can actually follow the piping from the front, back to the high pressure rear pistons and then the lines back up to the front low pressure pistons. Recycling in action. There is also the slot for the other line so it can slide with the front.
Jeff, I ran it through "those" MTL switches on my module (I was curious myself) and it ran through them okay. It actually has enough weight to hold itself down very nicely through the switches. I was looking at the wheels and they are all insulated. I see very little chance of any shorts to the rails. And I'm a hamster!
Here you can see the weight inserted into the boiler. This really helps give some traction. There are actually traction tires on the rear drivers. Also the two screws not to remove. These are just the motor holder screws.
As the co-producer of the Challenger locomotives, I can only say I am impressed. This is for the experts only. Yes, it looks scary, but as long as the drivers and rods are left alone, it should be OK. Thank you for provideing the photos. See you soon in Medford.
Nice work David! There is a guy at our club, who has been adding DCC and Sound to Athearn N Challengers, and he recommends the Loksound 82463, saying the sound is fantastic. Size: 1.22” long, 0.61” wide, 0.26” tall (35mm x 15.5mm x 6.5mm). See if there is room for one of them in the AZL tender. They also have the Loksound Mini, but I don't know the model number for the Challenger sounds. Each model number means it's programmed with the correct sounds for the correct locomotive, but you can buy a programmer for them to change the sounds to any model you want if you know how that loco is supposed to sound. Also, Jonsey said the Soundtraxx decoders sound good too, but are too hard to program, where the Loksound are much easier. I think the for the Challenger, you MUST add sound if you DCC it, to make the package sound as great as it looks!
Seriously, to take a $1,500.00 locomotive apart requires nerves and braveness. Seeing some components, there was some good engineering done. One question, the wheel sets of the unpowered front truck have gears on them?
Lajos, the fronts unfortunately don't have gears. The drivers are mounted in a solid casting. You can see that in one of hsi pix. So some extra work to be done. .
