Hornby Jinty

Mr Beecham, he of cycling and model making prowess, dropped this Hornby Jinty off for me to have a look at. He had bought it for the bargain price of £29 which given its condition and that it ran was a real scoop! He said it was a bit noisy and I said I would have a look.

 First thing was to get the body off which with these older Hornby models is easy as there is only one screw!

With the body removed there was a lot of oil - too much. These mechanisms only need a few tiny drops in the appropriate places. Too much and it just flies about and gets onto the pickups and into the motor - not good.

I removed the base plate which was soaking in oil.

The pickups were not looking too good either!

With cotton buds, making sure no fibers were left in the mechanism, I cleaned up the excess oil and cleaned the wheels and pickups.

With that cleaned up and put back together I turned attention to the motor. It is one of Hornby's XO series. Three pole design and fairly bullet proof but being three pole it is not the smoothest running nor quietest!

With the brushes removed the commutator revealed itself as being a bit mucky.

Cotton bud and IPA cleaned that up. You can see how dirty it was from the cotton bud.

I then took the motor out to clean the gears.

Clean gears require a few drops of oil so out came the special gear oil designed for the job and harmless to plastics.

With that the body went back on and it was onto the layout for s test.

It is, as I suspected i would because of the characteristics of the XO motor, noisy but it does seem to run a bit better and can even get down to a reasonable crawl for a model about 40 years old as this video shows!