driver532

It works .. Legomanbiffo sound is fitted. I have previously had a Howes sound decoder in a 73 (Hornby) and IF I buy another 73 I will put Howes in that loco..... my personal feelings are that a model should perform well out of the box and have an accurate representation of the colour of the real thing it supposed to represent. With the windscreen wipers not being correct either, its really not good enough for the money spent. On a positive note, nothing has fallen off mine.

Hopefully, I have solved the problem. Having ran the loco extensively in reverse I tried right direction again and the poor running over points returned. Yet again I cleaned the wheels - but I discovered that one wheel wasn't picking up power. By moving the wheel side to side, power contact was made from time to time. Doubtless not the approved method, I took a fine paintbrush and applied a drop of track cleaning fluid to the 'bush' that the wheel axle protrudes from. I take it the bush is also the contact point for electrical pick up. By using my wheel cleaning power supply I repeated the cleaner application and eventually the wheel transferred power as the others do. The loco has been running for some 15/20 minutes now at various speeds and looks to be performing just fine. Tomorrow I will re-install the sound decoder and see what happens...... Graham.

Its Lenz 100 Luke, - this is the only loco out of over a hundred sound and non-sound that does this.... I also re-set the Lenz. I've cleaned the wheels again even though there is no obvious sign of dirt or grease. I'm fortunate that I can see if a model is still running whilst I'm in our living room - so now the 73 has the Bachmann decoder back in and is having an hour running in each direction at a fixed speed while I watch tv....

I'm starting to despair with my model.... my layout is indoors and continuous DDC/Sound. Bachmann, Hornby and Heljan models run perfectly be it fast, slow, shunting speeds over straight line, curves and pointwork. I ran the Dapol 73 (BR blue one) with a Bachmann 21 pin decoder and at various places there was a scraping noise which turned out to be the lifeguards slightly too long. The loco was also juddery through pointwork which I had thought may have been due to the lifeguards. I persisted running it slightly faster than i would have liked for about an hour in each direction and it was still the same. I then fitted the Legomann V4 sound decoder which seems a lot slower through all speed increments and the loco now stops on all pointwork at all but near maximum power... running at any speed merely causes judder over pointwork and a very noticeable 'glitch' in the sound. I have cleaned my tracks and the loco wheels... As you can imagine, £200+ spent and this happening isn't going down very well at all. Has anyone else had the same problem on DCC and overcome it? "Thanks"..

Thankyou.

Please excuse me if I've posted this in the wrong place! (old age). Does anyone know if a speaker can be wired directly to the OO class 73 circuit board? I've looked but can't see anything marked 'sp' or 'spkr'. To be honest, my eyesight isn't wonderful due to cataracts but I'm sure I can still solder two wires to a circuit board - not very confident I could solder to speaker wires to a 21 pin decoder.. Hope someone knows the answer... "Thankyou"

I currently have around 200 British outline OO models and two are Dapol 52's. One runs but shorts over pointwork as it see's fit and the other is awful - full stop. One pair of wheels lift around curves and derail the loco. It runs for around 5 minutes and stops dead. Seems to 'cool' and runs a bit longer before stopping again... this is unacceptable in any model loco in 2013. I will try the DCC supplies route but I'm far from happy with the models that were so expensive .... I've ran American HO, European HO and British OO on my DCC layout with loco's from every major manufacturer and with DCC/Sound, I have more than 40yrs experience with model railways. No more Dapol class 52's will I buy.