A Job Never Ever Runs Smoothly - There is Always a But...

The Kato 10-1411 model is an N scale one of the 251 series "Super View Odoriko" trains in Japan.  These are 10 car sets that ran from 1990 to 2020. They were built by Kawasaki but don't sound like any Quaka two wheeler I know of!  So a bloke at the club asked me to install a decoder for him - I must have been at the end of his list and everyone else had knocked him back!  Anyway, I must have been in a good mood and said I'd do it for him.

For this job, he already had the small decoder a few of us use - the LaisDCC brand make some basic decoders, but they are very well priced and seem to work OK - got a bunch myself in various locos.  This one is about 15mm long by 9 wide, so is nice and small and should shoehorn in OK - fingers crossed.

Geez!  It took me 30 minutes to figure out how to get the lid off!  Kato make damned accurate stuff, like most Japanese manufacturers - I couldn't even find the join line... Nothing online about it either, as it is not a main item sold outside of Japan.  Anywho, finally got the lid off, then of course the next thing to take apart took another 30 minutes etc etc etc - getting the drift here?

Here we see the lid off and you can see that the wagon has a Kato Lighting kit already installed with the electrics at the right and the light bar running just under the roof space.

So here we see the next level of disassembly.

You can see here the two motor pickup tabs sticking past the two bus strips, which are already wrapped in Kapton Tape.  I'll end up solding wires to these and putting on some heatshrink.

And now we are stripped down to about the level we need to do the work.

In the top part of the pic below, we can see one of a pair strips that distribute the power up to the lighting. And the bottom part of the pic shows the two main bus strips that run along the wagon that collect the power from the two bogies.

And of course it is here where I did a pile of extra work that in the end, was not needed (pure arse in fact).  The lighting kit that was installed already is one that I was able to eventually track down as being something I own myself, yet have not used so far.  So I was able to look at the destructions and it only said DC - no mention of DCC compatibility at all. So I says to myself, self, we can do this by insulating the power feeds to the lighting module which normally just slide under the two main busbars.  Then the decoder lighting function can be used.

So here we see my neat, for a change, job of applying some Kapton Tape to insulate these strips.

Whilst doing this I arranged the parts together to make sure the decoder would stay out of plain sight and all was starting to look good.

I then removed the busbar strips so as to solder the main power leads to the decoder.  Best not to put the soldering iron near plastic.

It was when I was about to solder the wires to the motor that I realised these four wires (motor and busbar) were going to be visible in the windows of the passenger wagon - blast!  So I dug out some blue wire and wired ALL 4 with blue wire.  I will need to be careful in the later parts to trace all wires back to their source so I get the right ones for each decoder wire :-)

Yeh, I better do a neat job I suppose, so I got some of the ultra violet setting glue and glued the wires on the outside of the seats in a few spots (red arrows) along the wall sides of the wagon frame.

Next I trimmed the wires up and soldered them to their correct decoder wires and put on heat shrink - nice very small stuff (which I had gotten from LaisDCC themselves a while back - very handy stuff)

Then, a push and a push and a bend here and there and I got all the wires in and around the place and the decoder sitting in the right spot - no double sided tape needed (no room actually for it!).

Next, put it all back together again. - Yea... it fit and nothing jammed or stuck out... but...

So I took the lid back off for a final check and..... one of the lighting wires from the decoder fell off!  from inside under the heatshrink on the decoder itself - the yellow wire fell off !  Bugger, damn, Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.  Now what?  Oh yeh, put it all in a project box, put it aside and go do something else - a trip to Bunnings perhaps :-)

Over the next day or so I thought about it. The lights were a bit of a balls up since they would be driven by the loco Headlights and Reverse Light functions - not optimum, but would do. Now with one wire fallen off.......  buggered if I knew where on the decoder board it came from and I had no other decoder of the same type to compare to....

One more Google search and I found a train of thought in a 10 year old forum, about the lighting board - it wasn't ONLY DC - it also works on DCC !!  Yeeeeharrrrrrrrr !!

So I pulled the whole thing to pieces again and took the Kapton Tape Off of the two lighting feed strips.  I also unsoldered the remaining decoder lighting wires.  Assembly was performed and a test.

The lid went back on and I fired it all up on the test track again and it all worked nicely under JMRI as well as of course my NCE PowerCab DCC systems.  Job done.  Now to remember to give it back to it's owner on Wednesday....

Once More with Feeling

Think of the vision of PK hitting himself in the head numerous times.  So I bought ANOTHER QR 1720 loco over the weekend whilst up running trains at the Bundaberg Model Train Show.  So I now have three  Oh, and the so called mate that I did the last install for?....  he bought another, so guess who gets to do the sound decoder install, AGAIN....

Anywho, for my own install, I had a spare decoder kicking around - an ESU 58820 - LokSound v5 Micro of course, with the 8 pin plug, so just the jobbie for the loco.

I also has a spare 11mm x 15mm Sugar Cube speaker.  This one came as a pair of them from Auscision (part AM11679), so a snip with the cutters and one of them headed to the workbench.

I also had a bunch of leftover baffle bits and pieces from previous ESU 50321 speaker installs.

So I selected the skinny and medium thickness sides and one of the double bottoms.

I super-glued (thick plastic ZAP) the lid onto the larger baffle box and left the shallow one for the sugar cube to go on.  This should give a slightly larger sound box than I normally have in these 1720's.

Then I carefully applied some normal old PVA white glue along the edges ready for acceptance of the actual speaker.

The speaker was placed onto this white glue and left to dry for a few hours. Well, overnight actually.

Whilst the glue dried I attached a spare Sugar Cube speaker to the decoder and plugged it into the ESU test rig and fired up the ESU Programmer software. From there, I pushed the correct v5 Sound file to the decoder for the Queensland Rail 1720 class loco and tweaked a few settings.  I also then tested it under JMRI with my SPROG II gadget.  All proved well as one would like it to be.

Next I used a small Sellotape "Sticky Dot" - a gummy type of double sided thingie whatsit that is very thin.

The bottom of the fuel tank was then snapped back in place - juuuust fitted :-)

A piece of  normal Sellotape double sided tape was then used to put the decoder up into the rear of the loco shell.

Wires were tidied and the shell went back on... carefully...

A test run and she was done - another successful installation - phew !

 

Let's do it again - Let's do it again

Tis not a double up. My last entry showed my previous QR 1720 sound decoder install for myself - this time it is the one for my mate at the club.

So my friend handed me the goodies on Wednesday and I thought I'd do the job on Wednesday night while video chatting to a bunch of QR modellers, including the famous Mr Wuiske himself!

So step 1 was to do a quick test on DC to make sure the loco actually worked. All was good with it on the DC front.

Next was to look at the decoder and speaker.  It is an ESU 58810 LokSound V5 MM Micro 8-Pin Sound Decoder which comes with a 15mm x 11mm sugarcube speaker and the sound baffle bits. There is no sound file on the decoder when bought, but I was lucky and Mr Wuiske gave me the sound file last year for this new v5 decoder and I happen to have the proper ESU Programming gear.

Now let's have a gander at where the speaker goes.  The fuel tank on the bottom of the loco is actually hollow and has a removable speaker grill - kewl bannanas.

The loco shell now comes off so we can see what we have to play with.

Looks like plenty of space in the shell above the bogie at the rear of the loco (RHS in the pic) to put the decoder.  We'll use double sided tape to stick it to the roof of the shell.

So to make it easier, we unplug the front and rear lighting boards from the main board in the loco and put the shell somewhere safe. You can see the 8pin DC board in between the two 3 pin plugs.  It will get hoisted so as to allow the DCC decoder to take its place.

So at this stage I decided to test the decoder and push the QR 1720 sound file to it while I was at it - about a 20 minute job (plus or minus).  I used an old speaker that was lying around as I wanted to work on the sugarcube speaker for the loco install at the same time.

Now, the sugarcube speaker in this decoder kit comes with a baffle kit.  I chose the smaller walls so as to fit into the fuel tank without the need to cut the tanks bottom plate.  The sound from these speakers is great, even with the smaller baffle.

Now whilst gasbagging with the mob last night I asked what glue everyone uses to put these baffles together and the overwhelming answer was - White Glue. So I got my bottle of Aquadhere out and a toothpick and carefully applied the white glue around the edges of the baffle and speaker and put them together.  A couple of track rubbers were then set on top to hold it tightly together while the glue set - only took about an hour actually.

Next was to plug the decoder into the 8 pin socket (correct orientation of course) and the addition of some double sided tape to the decoder and plonk it onto the rear inside roof of the loco shell.

On the side of the loco mech there is a channel for the speaker wires to go down, so I pushed them through and then soldered a few inches (that's 52 mm to the younger bunch) of thin wire to extend them a tad so I had something to work with.

I used double sided tape to hold the speaker into the fuel tank cavity and then carefully soldered the wires from the decoder to the speaker.

The fuel tank cover was then snapped back into place and the loco was ready for testing.

And she worked like a treat and sounded just as good.  Check it out:  https://youtu.be/HZ0eF4XznNk

Because a Friend Needs It

So in February last year I installed a replacement sound decoder in one of my Wuiske brand HOn3½ scale  QR 1720 locos.  Why?  Because I broke, busted, destroyed, kaputted the original decoder when trying to install it. I am writing this now as a mate of mine will need to install a sound decoder in his since he just bought one of these locos.  Who's betting that the schmuck will end up installing the decoder - that schmuck being moi!

The new ESU v5 Micro sound decoder (the ESU 58810) comes with an 8 pin plug that uses a nice THIN flat strap for a connection - fits easier in the tight headroom of my QR1741D. A Sugar Cube speaker comes with it and is only 15 x 11mm and it fits nicely in the fuel tank and makes a whooping great noise.

The sugarcube speaker protruded just less than a millimetre through the fuel tank - so no problems at all, you cant even see it when it's on the track and it is safely above track level.

A small bit of double sided tape holds the decoder to the roof of the loco shell.

The 8 pin plug just goes straight into the main board of the loco without any problems,

For the speaker, I just cut a hole in the bottom of the fuel tank, a really neat and exact fitting hole in fact, and the speaker just sits in happily and goes nowhere.  A spot of glue could be used if a sloppy fit I suppose.

And that was pretty much it.  The little beastie makes a good noise and sounds beaut running around.

Oh, noise !!  Of course....  I forgot - the sound file.  Adam of Wuiske fame, gave me the v5 sound file for the 1720 back then when I asked him - see, he's not a bad bloke - hehehe.

So I have an ESU programmer and was then able to push the sound file into the decoder and the loco lives happily ever after.

Hopefully the QR DH locos will be as easy - hey Adam ? !!