Airfix 4F and DCC

[Dan Griffin]

Good morning.

 

Yesterday I purchased a 4F loco which I was lead to believe was a Hornby product, as it has a Hornby base plate.

 

The model is lovely and has been detailed and weathered by the previous owner. it has real coal in the tender, screw couplings etc.

 

It even has replacement pick ups on all driving wheels, and its tender driven which I'm no fussed about. the loco is in the 'preserved' fleet so will not be doing a great amount of running.

 

I have never attempted to convert an Airfix GMR model to DCC, and my question is, how do they run on digital? are there any special considerations to think about?

 

 It is a simple enough affair to chip it as there are no capacitors or anything like that.

 

The Airfix 4f

 

The replacement pick up arrangement

 

the basic motor and wires. there is plenty of spare room in the tender for the decoder.

 

regards

 

Dan

 

[34theletterbetweenB&D]

Have you given it a test with DC? (Use a 9V (PP9) block battery if you have no DC controller to hand.)

 

It has to be an adequate runner by your standards to be worthwhile converting to DCC. Assuming it runs adequately I would go straight to a Zimo decoder with this motor, as they have the range of adjustments to obtain all the potential performance from such mechanisms.

[Dan Griffin]

Yes it does run very well with a dc controller

[Barry Ten]

I've got a couple of these mechanisms running with a basic Hornby decoder, and they run very nicely on DCC.