Well, this probably won't excite you as it does me but friday night I successfully installed a Digitrax sound decoder into one of my Bachmann shays. I thought that it was a difficult task and I've been running away from it for sometime now. It took me about 20 minutes. All I have to do now is to seal the spaekers in the tender. I have another shay that I had installed a NCE 4 function plug and play decoder in. I will remove it tonight and replace it with the other sound decoder. From hence forth I will be hunting the sound decoders until all my HO engines have been fitted with the appropriate decoder. The first 5 engines in line are; a 8-40B (Atlas), 2 U30C (ATLAS), 2 SD70macs (KATO). Which sound decoder/s would be ideal for these engines?
Yes, it's fun. Running a steam engine with sound means running the engine with your ears. You drive slooowly! It's not difficult to install sound as long as you have some room. I've installed sound into quite a few engines, look at my homepage sound for Atlas's GP 40 and you will find more ideas. Happy toooot Wolfgang
Congrats! I know exactly how you feel. I did my own install on my LL 080. I also avoided the task for months as well. LOL FYI- I had seen many installs where people drilled really large holes in the coal load. Instead of doing a couple large holes I did a lot of really tiny holes. You can barely see them.
Thanks for the reply gentlemen. Wolfgang, love your website, It's veryvery informative. Keep up the good work. Geeky, I'm actually working on an alternative. As soon as I complete it I'll post the results here. verse
Maybe you could mount the speaker in the tender at an angle, so it faces the engine cab, then cut out the whole front of the tender. Then use some black woven cloth to cover the hole, so more of the sound could get out and might even reverberate off the cab interior? If you drill tiny holes in the coal pile, can you drill them at a low angle down in the corner of where three pieces of coal come together? Looking down you wouldn't see the holes, you would have to get almost at eye level? Maybe aim the holes toward the front and sides? When sound first came out, one guy removed all his coal pile, made a woven cloth pile, and lightly sprinkled larger pieces of coal, (No dust or tiny pieces). The sound came out all over between all the coal, but you couldn't see because of the black cloth and no light inside the tender. It was louder than the two big holes the other guys were drilling in the bottom of the tenders.
My shays all have oil tanks replacing the coal load. I was thinking of a edge ported speaker on the tank (sort of an extension) when I install sound...
Verse, I'v uploded a picture story to my album It shows and tell you how I installed sound and my working beacon light to Kato's GP 35. Wolfgang
