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....