Kato FEF3 - How are you folks liking yours?

[Teditor]

I would like to chime in with a how good the FEF-3 is but unfortunately our club experience is far different, we had an FEF donated that was dead on arrival, cause unknown, sent it away for an ESU decoder install, on return the loco sounds beautiful, threw the traction tires within ten minutes, new ones fitted no more problems, loco jerks along hunting side to side and back to front at lower speeds, around 40smph it runs smoother but not what I expect from Kato, the wheel gauge is spot on but gives trouble on one joint on a 15" radius curve, we are relaying the section of track which is difficult but frustration trying to get the loco to run through even at 10smph has beaten us, the accurate wheel gauge and accurate track gauge on the curve seem too much and the front driver climbs over the outside rail. With the traction tires on both rear drivers the loco seems light on the front end causing it to lift.
We also had trouble with the auxiliary tenders on the same place but seem to have resolved that, we had to cut off the nub on the rear cars bolster as it was fouling the body and the couplers have proven less than reliable, nothing else gives any trouble on the layout including, Kato GS-4, Bachmann EM-1, BLI 2-8-2 and Athearn Big Boy and all diesels.

[peteski]

These models are made like fine Swiss watches (with narrow tread and low flange wheels), so they also require smooth and very well-laid track to work.  They also have to be handled very carefully.  There are plenty of them out there running problem-free, or we would hear more about the,.

ESU decoders have really hard time driving the Kato Coreless motor.  There have been some discussions about the ideal BEMF settings to get the model to run smoothly. I was going to try compiling that info so I could get mine to run smoother, but I never got to that project. I seem to recall that @Dwight in Toronto might have some ideas how to fine tune the ESU BEMF for these models.

[Dwight in Toronto]

Peteski - thanks for the shout-out.  Man, you’ve got a great memory!

The discussion you were thinking about was in October 2023, where folks were helping me refine the performance of a small Dapol 060 Terrier.  I had installed a retrofit Tramfabriek coreless motor, and a LokSound nano decoder, and the pre-tweaking DCC operation was dismal!

The solution was a lengthy trial-&-error exercise involving repetitive LokProgrammer adjustments of all of the motor control parameters.  The biggest breakthrough was when Jim Starbuck provided me with an array of preliminary numbers that had worked for him. 

Here’s an excerpt from that discussion thread, wherein my final CV data is summarized:


Eventually I zeroed in on a suite of numbers that I think may have culminated in the epitome of what’s possible for slow speed running with my Dapol Terrier:

cv’s 2, 5 & 6 = 10, 58 & 125
cv 51 = 0
cv 52 = 0
cv 53 = 110
cv 54 = 20
cv 55 = 15
cv 56 = 255
cv 116 = 30
cv 117 = 50
cv 118 = 40
cv 119 = 40

For cv’s 118 & 119 (“Slow speed length of measurement gap” and “Full speed length of measurement gap”, respectively), I tried values ranging from 15, 20, 25, 30, and 40, none of which seemed to make any discernible difference.

After several hours of fine tuning, I managed to eliminate pretty much all of the high frequency jittery dithering that was detracting from speed steps 1 through 4.  Those crawling speeds are now “good enough” for me.

Here’s hoping that the above exercise can be of some benefit to ESU/Big Boy modellers.

[Hedron]

Since it's been brought back up...

I have an FEF with a similar problem, that is, it wants to climb the rail coming out of a curve. Checked gauge, reversed the front trunk, stretching the front truck spring a bit to see if i could get more down force, no joy. It has DCC wires running from the tender, rumor has it tension there can propagate,  and I've fussed with those to no avail. Lately I've been wondering if a driver is out of round or has some other variety of misshapenness.

I would like to chime in with a how good the FEF-3 is but unfortunately our club experience is far different, we had an FEF donated that was dead on arrival, cause unknown, sent it away for an ESU decoder install, on return the loco sounds beautiful, threw the traction tires within ten minutes, new ones fitted no more problems, loco jerks along hunting side to side and back to front at lower speeds, around 40smph it runs smoother but not what I expect from Kato, the wheel gauge is spot on but gives trouble on one joint on a 15" radius curve, we are relaying the section of track which is difficult but frustration trying to get the loco to run through even at 10smph has beaten us, the accurate wheel gauge and accurate track gauge on the curve seem too much and the front driver climbs over the outside rail. With the traction tires on both rear drivers the loco seems light on the front end causing it to lift.
We also had trouble with the auxiliary tenders on the same place but seem to have resolved that, we had to cut off the nub on the rear cars bolster as it was fouling the body and the couplers have proven less than reliable, nothing else gives any trouble on the layout including, Kato GS-4, Bachmann EM-1, BLI 2-8-2 and Athearn Big Boy and all diesels.

[peteski]

Yesterday I visited my friend who has the Kato FEF-3 with ESU decoder installed.  He has not ran it for probably couple of years.  When we put it ont he track, it ran terrible.  Kept stalling (losing power from the rails). We cleaned the drivers and tender wheels (basically all the wheels which pick up power) and that only improved things slightly.  With some troubleshooting we determined that pushing gently down on the front of the tender improved the electrical pickup.

That makes sense since the electrically-active drawbar, the front tender truck and the pickup strips from the rear off the tender all merge at the front tender truck, feeding power to the tender (and to the decoder).

I took the tender apart and polished all the metal contact areas involved in electrical pickup.  That is the rods in the drawbar where they contact the metal bearing  plates in the front tender truck, all the contact areas on the metal plates (where the drawbar conductors rub against them and the tops of the nubs on those plates which contact the brass strips in the tender).  I also took out and polished all the contact areas on those flat metal strips.  Lastly, I polished the tops of the nubs on the metal plates in the pivoting "truck" in the rear of the tender.

After reassembly the loco ran great!
I recall that after installing the decoder my friend and I spent some time trying to get the LokSound decoder to smoothy control the coreless motor. We actually got it to run quite well.  I tried Dwight's settings and the settings we came up with actually were smoother. The chuffs are also synchronized pretty well.

Ted, if you want I can email you our sound project so you can try it on your model.  But first make sure that the electrical contact is impeccable (because as I described, that can cause major issues which are not decoder related).  @Teditor  PM me your email address.