When I was younger I studied electronics and hence spent some time soldering up electric circuits. Soldering such circuits is fairly simple - slide the wires of a component through the board, lay the board upside down on the bench, touch the wires and board with a soldering iron and apply some multi-core solder. Job done.
Railway modelling also requires soldering but rarely has a nice board to solder onto. Consider soldering a wire to a din plug. You hold the plug in one hand, the wire in the other, grab the soldering iron in a third and apply some solder with… oh dear, you’ve run out of hands.
But that’s the method multi-core solder. There’s two parts to multi-core solder. The solder itself which is just a metal alloy with a lowish melting point, and flux which helps the solder flow over the surface of the components being soldered.
You can also buy separate flux and non-cored solder. This makes soldering tasks such as that described above much easier:
With a small paintbrush brush on some liquid flux to the places you want to join.
Take your soldering iron and touch it against the solder so that you have a small blob of solder on the tip.
Hold together the pieces to be soldered (use one of those ‘helping hands’ stands if necessary).
Touch the tip of the soldering iron briefly against the ‘fluxed’ joint. You will hear a fizz from the flux and the solder will flow wherever the flux has been applied.
Occasionally you’ll find that you didn’t have enough solder on the tip of the iron and you’ll need to go back with some extra, or you may need to re-apply the flux, but things will improve with practice.
The above process may sound slightly complex but once you get into a routine you can get soldering at a reasonable pace, and with only two hands.
(For fitting instructions for other Bachmann/Graham Farish diesels see here).
At the time of writing the Bachmann/Graham Farish class 66 is unique among N gauge British outline models in being the only one which has a chassis that was designed with DCC in mind. It therefore seems like the ideal candidate to use as the subject of a first DCC conversion. Full instructions for conversion are included with the model, but this article should prove of use to anyone who has yet to purchase or who has lost their instructions.
The body is attached by a clip at each corner. The best way I have found to remove it is to hold the chassis each side of the buffer beam with one hand, gently grip the cab sides with the other and wiggle the body free. Repeat this at the other end.
Remove the small screw at each end of the circuit board and lift it straight upwards. Be careful not to damage the motor power clips underneath the board (see the next photo).
The decoder wires are soldered to the connectors marked 1-8 on the board. Remove the two ‘DC clips’ from the circuit board, then solder the wires in the following sequence:
Connector
Colour
8
Red
1
Orange
2
Yellow
4
Black
5
Grey
6
White
7
Blue
(Note that the connector numbers are out of sequence on the circuit board and the above listing is from left to right).
Attach a small piece of insulating tape to the top of the chassis under where the connectors will go to prevent any shorts and screw the board back on.
The decoder can now be secured onto a self adhesive pad in the recess to the right of the connectors. Normally the decoder would fit underneath the lighting wires, but I managed to cut the wires a little too short and have fitted it above them, as shown.
Programming
Reattach the body and put the loco on the DCC programming track to set the decoder address and any other settings you want to change.
Pop the loco on the main track and off you go. Select function 0 to turn on the directional lighting…
...and at the press of a button…
The class 33/1 conversion is now complete. Well, more or less.
The conversion kit is very simple, if a little fiddly. It consists of two replacement ends for the Farish 33, an etch with pipe details and some replacement headcodes.
All you do is: remove the old ends and extract the glazing; drill holes in the new ends for the pipes; paint the ends and an extra glazing bar in the windows (which is missing from the Farish original); attach the pipework (the fiddly bit); paint the pipes; and (if you want) change the headcodes.
It was my first experience of painting a model and turned out much better than I’d expected. I even managed to paint the handrails silver without getting paint everywhere.
But now for the downs I mentioned in the title.
The model I’m converting is painted in NSE livery, and I want to convert it to banger blue. I had some paint stripper from Expotools and tests inside the shell showed it appeared to be safe on the plastic. Applying it to the outside of the shell stripped the paint fairly well, but when I used some Cif cleaner and started scrubbing the paint off with an old toothbrush the brush started digging into the surface of the plastic. Ouch.
I assume the stripper had softened the plastic enough for the toothbrush to gouge into it, but not done enough damage to show up in my test.
I’ll have to obtain another body and have a go with either acetone (nail varnish remover) or isoropyl acohol, both of which seem to be recommended for paint stripping on Farish models.
The problem left me feeling pretty down at first, but one of the best ways to learn is by making mistakes. I just hope for better things on the next try.
And the nice paint job on the new ends left me eager to make a start painting some wagon kits I made up last year. I’ll post some pictures later, but the results so far are looking rather good.
I decided the software writing was taking too much time away from the time I should be writing software to sell, so I’ve put that on hold for a few weeks.
But being bored with only having a simple oval, I’ve ordered the track for the next stage. This will be the second loop on the twin track main line. I’ve also ordered that track for the single track branch line, since this only needs two sets of points and a few lengths of flexi-track, and it wouldn’t be economic to place a separate order.
I grew up near the Waterloo to Weymouth line and have a soft spot for 4-REPs, 4-TCs and class 33/1s. I ordered a TPM class 33/1 conversion kit last year but was put off about having to paint it before assembly. In fact I’ve been put off painting anything by my complete lack of artistic ability. But I’ve decided it’s time to bite the bullet.
So I’ve started the kit by painting the ends of the conversion kit with Railmatch warning panel yellow. It’s taken three coats so far and the original resin still isn’t completely obscured, which is a little disappointing, but apart from that they’re looking good now. The next step is to add the etches for the jumper cables and to strip and repaint the body from my NSE liveried donor.
I posted this link on the n gauge modern yahoo group and a couple of people reported it was standard practice in some parts of the US. Presumably involving a brave (or stupid) JCB driver.
Last time I mentioned I was having problems with the software forgetting which train was in which block.
Closer investigation showed that there was a problem with one particular block. The train would leave the block and the ‘occupied’ light would go out, but shortly afterwards the occupied light would come back on and stay on.
I checked the wiring but there where no faults there, so I ran a test train over it at slow speed. For testing I’d hooked up a loco to a rake of coaches. Normally for block detection you would wire a resistor across a wheelset at the end of a train, otherwise you would just detect the presence of the engine. But I hadn’t got around to installing any resistors on the coaches.
So the block would read empty while the coaches where still occupying it. I didn’t think this would be a problem for some simple testing. However, occasionally one of the wheels on the train was making an electrical connection between the two block segments and the Lenz LB101 block sensor would be detecting the presence of the loco in the briefly linked block. And for some unknown reason it would fail to register the block as empty once the connection was broken. My assumption is that there is a fault in the Lenz LR101 feedback sensor when there is only a momentary signal on the input.
Later I’ll add some extra code to the software to double check the LR101 status when such a spurious signal arrives.
I removed the carriages and testing with one loco now worked flawlessly.
I added a second loco and again all worked fine - the trailing loco successfully stopping at the entry of the previous section whilst it waited for the first loco to exit. But I did notice on a couple of occasions that the LR101s would fail to successfully report that a section was empty. Usually this was corrected when a loco entered or left another section using the same LR101 (the LR101s report back the status of a block of four feedback items at one go).
That was until the lead loco simply refused to enter a section which was shown as being empty.
This afternoon I added a lot of extra code to the software to log the state as it gets updated by locos entering and exiting blocks. I’ve left two locos trailing each other around for over an hour waiting for the problem to recur but, as sods law often dictates, everything ran perfectly.
