Royston show - this Saturday
At Peterborough I had a chat with someone from the Royston club about taking the layout there next year however someone dropping out and a quick message to me has turned this into this Saturday instead! So, if you are around about North Hertfordshire do drop in.
This has meant a slightly accelerated look at the snag list from the last show but has hopefully resulted in a couple of useful improvements. First up was to lok at a couple of locos that had misbehaved - couldn't find anything wrong with one of the Baldwins but the other had blown it's chip up. Unfortumately I don't have any sound chips spare at the moment so had to put in a TCS T1 to which I have added a stay alive capacitor buy soldering direct onto the chip - not for the faint hearted as they say. Some slightly heftier pick ups has sorted out one of the 20hp Simplexes but another one had blown it's chip too. Again I didn't have a spare DCC Concepts Zen chip so just thought I would try it with a TCS - what a difference! I have never been happy with the Zen chips as despite my best efforts with CV values they just always seem to be off or full on with the TCS I have got the loco to go absolutely reliably at a crwal which covered on foot of track in fifteen minutes! Only problem is that the chip and capacitor are nearly as large as the loco itself so have them on an umbilical cord and will dump them in a wagon behind. Hardly a long term solution but will be interesting to see how it performs under exhibition conditions.
I also looked at the Baldwin Gas Mechanical with a view to getting the connecting rods back on which will make a lot of prople very happy! Unfortunately they will remained dismayed as found that the chip I had put in is fouling the requisite hole. As it is working perfectly now I am not going to disturb it just yer. I did disturb the Crochat however and had a play with the boggie pivots as I had found that it was getting beached on certain points on the layout eith the driven axles not making contact with the rails. Think I have sorted it now and had it at an even slower crawl than the Simplex with it covering half of the 8x4 test track in an hour and forty minuets before I dcided that I had some wet paint that I really had to watch instead.
Other thing I did was to take up one of Trevors suggestions to speed up putting up the pelmet by replacing the captive nuts with a stud and using a butterfly nut from above. Here is one with my little jig for getting them all the same length. I forgot to take a shot of the finished article but it looks suprisingly like a piece pf wood with a bolt sticking out of it!
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