First Job for the 2023 New Year

I was having my last train run in HO scale for 2022 down at AMRA last Friday night and was running my old TrainOrama NSW 49 class, number 4912,  at the head of my recently weathered steel train and realised that the sound was a bit - muted.  So today it was let's get into it day. So off with the shell and see what we have.

You can see the old sugarcube at the rear of the loco. 

I removed it as I wanted a matched pair to go in, which would give more noise.

She's got a Tsunami TSU-AT1000 decoder in her and had a very old single Sugar Cube I put in after getting her - definitely NOT ENOUGH NOISE.  Here's the old speaker after removal.  I'll test it properly and find a loco that needs just a single speaker.

So I got out my bit box and found 2 brand new ESU Sugar Cubes - the 11 mm x 15 mm jobbies. 

And of course who doesn't have a pile of the speaker box bits from previous installations of the ESU speakers :-)

I then needed to make up a mounting plate to carry the speakers in the loco, so a bit of 2 mm styrene from the scrap box was found and will suit - just trim her up a bit to fit.

I drilled the four holes at the corners and did a test fit to make sure the loco shell would fit on and she did.

Next step was to work out the speaker box. I reckoned that the dual box from ESU would do well. So I got the bottom piece out so I could cut the styrene to suit it.

Oops - I did a test fit and hmmm, yeh, well, ummm, nope. To get as big a boom box setup as possible, I needed to have one speaker a smidge lower in the frame than the other and one thing led to another and I decided two seperate boom boxes would suit me better.  And of course the bag of speaker box bits came to the party with the required components. So here we see the 2 speakers and the boom box bits.

So the speakers ended up being 8½ mm high - the max I could fit - sweet. I used Plasti-Zap to put them together as it is a slow super glue and works with plastic nicely.

So with a bit (a lot) of jiggery-pokery I got the two speakers into the mounting plate where I wanted and got a few drops of Plasti-Zap on the boxes to hold them into the mounting plate. Then the soldering iron was fired up and the wires from the decoder tinned and joined to the speakers.  

Now, the speakers are 8 ohm and hence since this is a Tsunami decoder, they must be wired in series and NOT parallel.  On an ESU LokSound decoder you can and do wire them in parallel.  So series it was and the 16 ohm load was now attached.

A quick test on the test track proved all was well, so the shell went back on and then the couplers put in place to hold it all together.

A fire up on the test track again and all was good and noise louder than before, so I must have got it right :-)  Can't wait to get her on the track down at AMRA next Friday night :-)   ...  Now where is that other 49 class loco, the candy coloured one - 4903... yep, there she is, on the shelf with a note to sort out the speaker on it already!  She can be next - maybe tomorrow though.  I have the speakers and such, so nothing holding me back :-)