Geep Geep

You just gotta love those old 4 axle EMD GP38-2 locos.  The GP38-2 was an upgraded version of the earlier GP38 and they had power provided by an EMD 645E 16-cylinder donk, which generated 2,000 horses under the bonnet.  They are my next favourite after the 6 axle EMD SD40-2 locomotive (3,000 horses - now whilst reading that bit, imagine Tim the Toolman grunting...).

So I happen to have three of the N scale Walthers GP38-2 locos.  These were based on the Life-Like model, so are a pretty old design.  But they are good runners and it was time for them to coming into this century and get DCC decoders installed.  The mechanism is easy enough to work with to convert from DC to DCC.

I happen to have from previous purchases, some of the Digitrax DN163A0 decoders on hand. They don't quite fit the loco, but with a minor modification they will fit - involves a hacksaw !

So, by adding another slot for the DCC Decoder board to slot into, it will all fit. So the hacksaw got to come out and play. The slot only needed to be 4-5 mm deep so it didn't reduce the strength or weight of the loco body.

There, the cut is done. I then tidied it up with a small file to remove the dags around the edges.  You can see my cut on the left, replacing the manufacturers slot just to its right, which wasn't going to do the trick for the decoder I have on hand.

Testing the decoder fit - it lines up OK.

And it is a nice snug fit, so the electrical conductivity is good.

Next I soldered on some wires to the motor and fed them up through the body.  Of course before I did this I lubricated all the gears and bearing points with my seleection of oils and greases.

Then the soldering iron got used again to solder these two wires onto the DCC Decoder - in the correct location of course.  OK, OK, so I got them swapped around and had to swap them over after I tested it - we all make mistakes!

The shell was then placed back on the loco and a full programming of settings using JMRI software was performed and the loco then tested fine.  After I do the next two GP38-2 locos, I will compare them all and make sure they are tweaked prepoerly so as to all run at the same speeds.