new guy

[cteno4]

I hope yours was an isolated case. The one return I had to ma was for a melted down truck on a power unit that has detailed on a point and shorted the frog and was not seen for a bit and did not trip the powerpack breaker (we later installed separate breakers). I was able to get it sent back thru the dealer to ma and they replaced the trucks for all of 700 yen (that included shipping back to the dealer). One of our club members got a ma set that had a few floppy rapido couplers that would not stay coupled long. He contacted ma thru the dealer and they sent 2 packs of ma close coupler for free to just fix the whole issue (when I converted it for him I found a few of the springs were more compressed than others and I suspect a few strays from another spring set got mixed in by mistake or just some bad springs.)
 

not saying they didn’t treat you badly in this case, it’s that they don’t do this all the time and whole company should not be judged by one case.

 

I think yours was too quickly dumped by the tech into the pile of returns that had been clogged with lots of running as it behaved that way w.o ever seeing your note it had less than 30 min of run time. I’m sure they get lots of trains that have been run long and hard in a dirty environment and expect ma to repair it. It could have even been something like a cat hair mucking it up fast. I had one club member bring me a new kiha that was not running well and it was all totally clean looking and then I pulled it apart and found 4 long cat hairs wrapped in the worm gears — he had 2 cats one of which would sit on the layout table. It’s the one downside to going smaller dirt is more of an issue — I’ve not done T scale for a while now as it’s super fast to get mucked.

 

part of doing an import hobby is realizing it may not be as easy to return things or get repairs as the costs for shipping can really add up and communication and culture is different. Also except for Kato, really, train export really doesn’t exist for manufacturers, just something some dealers do on the side. Tomix use to state no warrantee outside japan. Even Katousa is not keen much of the time dealing with Japanese items that they bring over. Folks have had tussles with Kato and Tomix like yours with ma at times as well. Just saying don’t let one experience spoil it for you as you may run into it again now and again. Overall the quality and bang for the buck makes up for a few bumps like this.

 

jeff