First sound install.

[Free At Last]

Since I decided I was not going to purchase any more locos/stock that do not represent value for money to me I now have funds for other things.

I thought I would dip my toes into dcc sound and started with a YouChoos decoder for the Bachmann 1P, an easy one as the speaker is already fitted.
Being impressed with it I decided to have a go at installing sound to a Hornby Stanier Tender as I have a lot of locos with this style tender. I bought a YouChoos decoder each for a Princess Royal and Princess Coronation with Dual Icecube 28x18x10 speakers.
Had to do a little bit of work to the tender weight to accommodate the speaker as I wanted to leave it in. The first one took a bit of playing with to find the best place to pack the kit without removing any plastic. Once I had settled on a method the second one was a doddle.

 

I unfixed the 8 pin socket and cut off the mounting posts and made a plate to refit the socket with plasticard.

 

A bit of paint and it looks a goodun.

 

Speaker fitted and the small stay-alive capacitor that came pre-fitted has a ready made home.

 

Carefully coiled the harness and held with a bit of tape ready for the body to be refitted.

 

And here is Princess Elizabeth having her first run.

Looking forward to forward to doing the rest of my stock.

Special thanks go to Bachmann and Hornby for influencing my decision to spend my money elsewhere.

[Free At Last]

This afternoon I set about fitting sound to two Hornby Duchess locos, Sutherland and Abercorn. Easy install as the 8 pin socket is in the tender and as there is no bunker for the coal on these two tenders, plenty of room inside for a dual speaker.

I did one and connected it to a loco and went to set it up on Decoder Pro. The first thing I do is read and save all sheets but instead of the wheels 'ak aking' it was like programming a Sinclair ZX81 with a cassette tape, strange I thought but this is new to me so I let it run it's course. It read all sheets and I gave it a new number and a few tweeks then went to run it on Decoder Pro and it made a noise like trying to run a dc loco on dcc. I stopped it and tried again and got the same result. Thinking the decoder may be duff I removed it and re-fitted the previous working TCS decoder and that was the same.

It turned out I had fitted the tender to the wrong Duchess and the 4 pin loco to tender plugs are wired different, one has pickups wired to the centre pins and motor to outside pins and the other completely the opposite. Who would have thought Hornby were that sh*te.

Luckily after trying the sound decoder again with the other loco it was still working, huge sigh of relief as they cost £110.

Lesson learned but I will have to check my other locos with these connections to determine which is the standard. Knowing Hornby there won't be one.

I've always programmed my locos on a program track after installing a decoder and now use Decoder Pro and I have never had one wired wrong yet, but I thought there would have been some notification of a short if there was one.

[Free At Last]

Yesterday I fitted sound to a Bachmann Webb Coal Tank, easy as it has a Next18 socket and a ready wired space in the bunker for a speaker. The recommended speaker is an 8mm sugarcube but on fitting I found it too tall and the pcb board with the solderless speaker connections on would not sit on properly and one pad was not making a connection. A 1mm plastikard shim was made and this did the trick. On putting the body back on I noticed I should have cut out the plastikard around the half round bit on the pcb as it fouled the body fixing lug but only took seconds with a scalpel.

[woodenhead]

I cannot believe I am saying this, it looks easier to fit sound into an N gauge loco!

 

But I agree with you thoughts on less is more - lack of new locos to buy means more time spent on the locos I have and I am slowly working through my collection of N diesels and adding sound.

 

Not sure if I will be doing sound on the N gauge steam locos, but once I have trimmed down my OO collection to just GWR I am considering sticking some sugar cubes in them.