A few weeks back I decided it was time to get this loco tooting, my HO scale Bachmann 4-4-0 Baldwin Tender Loco that is. So Louisville & Nashville number 7 was dug out and I got to it with the tools.
This one comes in two parts - the front half, and the back half. The electronics are located in the back half - technical term for it is the "Tender". With the Tender disconnected from the front part, I had a look underneath to see what we have there. You can see there are the two plugs going to the front half of the loco and the wipers for power pickup and a large round area where there is room for installing a Speaker.
Two screws at the front end of the Tender were removed thereby allowing the top to come off and we can have a gander inside. The black thing in the left of the pic is the Bachmann DCC Decoder and then there is the wiring distribution board to its right.
Unplugging the decoder and a couple of small screws later we have the board removed as well and we can see the space we have.
I reckon the space available in the tender will suffice for what I want to do to it. I have a Tsunami ECO-200 for Steam sound decoder (pn 891002) on hand that I had picked up somewhere for a good price. It'll do the job and fit in nicely. It has heaps of different Loco sounds to choose from to make the loco sound the way I want.
For the sound to come out, I had some of these "Sugar Cube" speakers kicking around with various chambers to use on them and decided to give them a go. So one of the ESU LokSound 50321 jobbies was used. It has a size of 11 x 15 mm and I used the 4mm deep chamber for it.
Since the chamber has to be sound tight for maximum sound production and it is plastic, I used a medium thickness super glue made for plastic - "Plasti-ZAP ". I have found it is a really good glue for a lot of the general plastic work on models.
Being that I like to drive my trains at a more realistic speed and not race around like they are all Shinkansens, sometimes they stutter or stall on the dirty patches of track or the junctions. So I decided to put in a "Stay Alive" or "Keep Alive" as they are known in the model train arena - think of them as a small battery. I had read up a fair bit about Super Capacitors which are used to make these Stay Alives and thought I'd make my own to save a buck or two. A friend at the club had a bunch of them at a really good price, so I obtained a couple of dozen for a few projects. At a later date I'll put up an article with some testing results about some Stay Alives. In the meantime, for a read, check out -
Mark Gurries site for some good info on they Super Capacitors and such:
Marcus Amman has some great info:
http://www.members.optusnet.com.au/mainnorth/alive.htm
http://www.members.optusnet.com.au/mainnorth/alive.htm
Larry Puckett also has the circuit I used to make my own Stay-Alive for this loco:
So with my 4 super capacitors a resistor, a diode and a zener diode, away I went and built my own Stay-Alive that also happened to fit the space I had available.
OK, so I have in the past botched a thing or two and I decided to play it safe for once. Before I unsoldered all the wires from the electronics board in the tender, I spent quite some time and documented them. It helped as Bachmann had decided to make them all the colours of the rainbow - NOT. They were ALL Black, and we are not talking footy here.
Now to position all the components so they will fit. First I had to cut off the metal mounting posts that Bachmann had used for their board - this gave me a bit more room to play with. A few attempts were made and eventually I decided the speaker and Stay-Alive could be glued to the floor of the tender using that same ZAP glue as before.
The next step was to decide where the decoder would go. The floor of the tender didn't have the space for this largish decoder, so of course the roof would do. With some double sided tape, I whacked the decoder up on the roof of the tender.
I now spent some time cutting wires to length and neatly soldering the decoder wires to the loco wires, making sure to use heat shrink tubing to insulate them all. Once done, even though it was in a messy state, it was time to make sure it all worked before I went any further. So carefull arrangement of it all on the rolling road test kit and I fired up the PC with JMRI and my SPROG and proceeded to give it a whirl and made sure the lights, sound and motor all did what they were asked to do.
Then I had to make a few attempts to squeeze all the wires and parts into the tender, making sure not to squash any of them.
A quick test of it all again on the rolling road and she was ready for running - job dnoe and another loco ready for some running on a track somewhere.
No comments:
Post a Comment