Received an e-mail that my B'mann 2-10-2 ESU LokSound project is completed and ready for pick up. Eager to get it.
I have almost 22oo uF of capacitance in my Atlas SD26 and Kato SD45. I used several 330 uF and 220uF 16V capacitors in parallel.
gatr or anybody, does using the high 2200uF cause your DCC system to detect a short, at start up of the loco, and shut down ? Carl
I have not tried any pulling tests with any of the ones I own. I did pick up the one I had ESU LokSound installed into the Bachmann Vanderbilt tender sold to go with their 2-6-6-2. I am really impressed with the sound quality.... I had him install the ESU speaker. He said is was a tight fit in the tender with speaker up front and decoder behind. The sounds were too loud when I got it home, so I reset the master volume CV to a lower value. I look that rail joint click sound.
I am hoping to get mine installed today. Have everything I need (I hope). This shouldn't be too difficult, after taking out the stock decoder board, there is a lot of room in the tender (just have to watch where the three screw posts come down through the floor).
I left the board in my tender and just soldered the TS 750 to it . Has a Soundtrax 1/2 round speaker and enclosure under the coal . Everything fits nicely after I thinned the coal load and cut down the enclosure a bit .
Well CRAP I spent most of yesterday carefully getting everything installed, finished this morning (yes, was taking my time to do it right -- added keep alive caps, etc). My only problem was getting the speaker to fit, which necessitated using a flat styrene sound chamber, vs the SBS supplied chamber. Everything was packaged up this morning, and ran beautifully. Got it programmed, even. So then it was time to get the decals on the tender, and the numbers under the cab. Everything still looking good. But I noticed the tender shell was up in the front right corner. Poked the tab, and down it popped. After dullcoat dried, put back on test track, and had a short! But simple one. Opened up the tender just through the coal load, and saw I had pinched two wires (orange and red) under the right corner. Popped shell off, repositioned all wires, and ran loco with shell loose. No issues. Put the screws back in to attach shell.... White Smoke comes pouring out of tender. Then bad words come pouring out of my mouth. Does ESU have "no fault" replacement?
This is precisely why I hire some one to do my decoder installations. Even at $130 per loco for ESU, it is worth knowing it was done by a registered dealer.
^ Yep, already ordered. I found the point of the short, and know how to fix, once new decoder arrives.
Me too. As soon as this happened, I cleaned up, putting everything away, and then got really really mad at myself.
OKAY! YAY! LET THE PARTY BEGIN So, got the replacement decoder, did things a little differnt, and everything has worked out beautifully. This 2-10-2 sounds great, runs great, and now looks great! I had bought it, last year, from MC Fujiwara, as an undecorated unit. I put decals and weathered, to turn it into SP 3762, but after about 6 months, the decals all peeled. Very frustrating, and have no idea what the problem was (yes, I know how to apply, so something clearly was wrong, either with that sheet -- or maybe something was just "not right" that day. Who knows). Anyway, here are some photos of the ESU install process. No video/sound to show off (at least not today) Here is the Bachmann loco, taken apart, with its standard card still installed. (you can see on of the bad decals under the fireman's window). Also shown are the speaker, the decoder, the keep-alive capacitors and a couple small connectors Here's a close up of the sugar-cube speaker (11mm x 15mm) which I used. You can see how made my own micro connectors, to ease putting the speaker in. In the end, I actually didn't use this speaker, but one with a smaller sound chamber, to fit. The stock chamber was just too big (and was a contributor to my initial decoder blowup) There was a nice little well in the plastic bottom of the tender, above the weight, so I put Kapton Tape down on the weight, then put the 5 220uF capacitors (wired in parallel) into the well. You can also see the wires coming off the trucks, since there is no longer a contact strip for them, from the Bachmann board Initially, I was trying to use micro-connectors for the loco to decoder section, but I think that was the other contributor to my blow up. So, this morning, I took a small piece of styrene, and CAed 6 small pieces of PCB ties to it. One tie has a surface mount resistor on it, for the front headlight (W). You can also see I did the same in the rear, for the light, and for the neutral side connection of the capacitor block I put the decoder over the capacitor block, and wired everything to the correct posts. After this photo, I put Kapton tape over all the solder points and wires, and used some double sided foam tape to place the speaker over the connections on the left, which is under the coal load.
After all that, and careful checking at each step of the way for shorting, I buttoned up the tender. Here she is on my test/programming layout (raining, not going out to the JACALAR for photos this weekend)
