Good afternoon all, I trust you are all enjoying your glorious bank holiday weekend.
I had a busy day yesterday working on a few customer’s locomotives. The first was a DCC fitted OO scale class 08 shunter that refused to move. After resetting the decoder all was well and the motor sprang back in to life. The customer was really pleased with how quick and simple the repair was, and the fact that there was no charge to him because it only took me 2 minutes to fix. One happy customer! 🙂
The second locomotive was sent in to me with lighting problems and a motor that also refused to budge, and problems with reading CV settings from the decoder. This locomotive is a OO scale Bachmann class 20 (20164) in BR blue with some lovely weathering and a lighting conversion installed by another supplier. Inspection of the 21 pin plug board on the chassis revealed dry solder joints and thinning of the wire at the joints for the pick-ups and motor outputs, this had been caused by cyclic loading flexing the wire to the point where the fine strands had broken down increasing resistance at these points and thus reducing current flow. Removing the four soldered wires, and then stripping them back to fresh wire before tinning and soldering back in to place allowed a good clean electrical contact to be made. This then allowed the successful reading of CV settings from the decoder, which allowed me to adjust the function mapping to rectify the lighting issues. A test run on the rolling road showed that the lights now work as they should according to the corresponding function outputs, and the motor was operating again. A video of this lovely Bachmann locomotive running again can be seen below.
The last job of the day was a Graham Farish N scale class 66 (66731 ‘Interhub GB’) that had been sent to me earlier in the week. It is a sound converted locomotive previously installed by another provider that had no motor output, and the sound quality was distorted and getting progressively worse. After repairs to the motor wiring, and installing a new speaker with a much reduced master volume, the end result was a very nice sound fitted class 66 still loud enough to be heard from a distance. The master volume on the sound decoder was previously set excessively high by the original supplier, which had caused the speaker to become damaged and distorted over a very short period of time. This locomotive has already had a replacement speaker previously, and is now running on it’s third speaker! I have created a video below with 66731 on my rolling road, and this demonstrates that the motor now works perfectly and the sound quality has vastly improved compared to when it first came in to my workshop. Enjoy the video, and your bank holiday weekend 😉
