So this is a quirky one that I only got because I used to ride this thing to Dallas Maverick games 30 years ago when I was in high school so a bit of nostalgia for me. It's a good runner with the ESU. When I first opened it up I nearly jumped up and down. There is so much room in this thing it's amazing. Install itself had plenty of options. First picture of where the tabs are to remove the shell. Pet peeve of mine when folks dont show this. You do not have to remove couplers or anything in this model. Simply use your fingernails to spread right in front of and right behind where the shell goes to its lowest points on the sides. Take out the original light board by removing the tabs that provide connection to motor from pickup tabs and to the light board. The great news is you can discard those tabs and it means you are now dcc ready and isolated. Ok now let's get to work on the light board. I try to reuse the original lightboard when I can and this was easy to do so. I had to cut the trace at two points. One was to isolate the negative LEDs from each other. You can see that cut in the center of the board to the right of the middle resistor and the other is under the resistor on the right for the rear light. For the headlight I simply removed the existing resistor (one in middle of picture and put a 1k in there. I then took the old LEDs off as they were dims and yellow and put some nice bright whites in there and soldered a 1k resitor in the back on the bottom of the board bridging where I had cut the PCB trace. The resistors and up being on the bottom when installed. Again could have put on top. Tons of room and all plastic around. Now figure out where to put the decoder. I put it on the back on top but honestly it could have gone back under, middle bottom or top etc but this worked fine. I then soldered the blue common positive to the original board that and the positive side of both LEDs and then soldered the front and rear headlight negative leads in there spots. Again I try not to reinvent the wheel. Just scraped a solder point on original board. Ok so now to do the motor and power attachments. I had seen a lot of people cut the plastic tabs above the motor connections to supposedly route wires. I actually found it helpful to just run the wires under the tab, cut to the right length and the solder. Made for a super clean install with absolutely zero frame mode. I did not remove the motor connections just soldered straight to them quickly with no I'll effects and then soldered the pickups after that. Here is a top view showing how clean this made the installation with no risk of wires pinched etc. Looks really good. Note that I did put the decoder where I did and route it to where if I need to take off the light board for whatever reason I can do so without unsoldering the motor and pickup connections. There is enough slack and wire length putting the decoder where I did. Just in case I ever want to change resistance or leds or whatever. Pop the top back on after putting light board back in and good to go. This one was pretty quick and worked well. If I do another I will probably add red leds for the front ditch lights. Would be easy as there is already light tubes on the shell for them. And since there is 2 extra functions on the nano why not use the. Installing a sound decoder and speaker would be really easy as well without frame modification. Probably need to hack up the lightboard some but really minimally and you could put a speaker and enclosure over the rear worm gear and put the decoder in the center. Plenty of room to tuck a few keep capacitors in there for stay alive also if desired. So highly recommend as an easier install for non plug and play. As I said great runner with the ESU on it. Out of control scale speed fast but you can always cut that back in the decoder settings. Hope this helps someone else!
