Page 5. Another Summer
passes by, and Autumn 2008 arrives!
October
1, 2008.
Yesterday it was
dark at 7:00, it was cold and raining outside, leaves are beginning to fall from
the trees..we havent had the first "killing frost" yet though, so the vegetable
garden is still half-heartedly
producing tomatos and cucumbers.. I still have
to do one one last mowing of the lawn, put the deck furniture into the
shed, and winterize some shrubs..yes,
the Carnivorous
Plants are still feeding..but make no mistake..summer is over.
So last night
I dragged the forney cab out of storage and took a look at it. I havent laid
eyes on it for 5 months!
I was afraid of
this.. the styrene roof
of the cab I built last March, seen here:
Has warped a bit.. I thought that
might happen.. All the styrene
bits of the cab are glued together with plastruct "plastic weld" glue.. an excellent
stryene glue for most applications.. but because the
styrene roof was so thin, the curved "supports" under the roof created
a pronounced "ridge" down
the top of the roof where the supports were glued to the underside of the
roof.. this ridge is
very visable on the TOP of the cab! its no good...I have to rip off the
roof!
I attacked the
roof with an x-acto blade, scraping and cutting it off..then filed down
the remains of the roof at the top
of the walls to make a new smooth surface..then fabricated a new roof out
of thin brass sheet and
super-glued it on:
This roof shouldnt
warp! one drawback
though..its too thin! I will probably
add some very thin styrene bands to the underside of the roof edges to
give the roof edge
the necessary "thickness"..
And thats all
I did for the first evening's work of the new winter model building season! More building
continues soon...
October
6, 2008.
The trials and
tribulations of RE-assembling wires an electronic bits...
I spent the last
few evenings putting all the electronics and wiring back together!
As I said earlier,
electronics isnt my strong suit! I dont know much
about it..I wish I had taken a "basic electronics" class in highschool
or college, but I dont recall one ever being
available..I've picked up bits and pieces of knowledge over the years,
but I still dont know much.. I can do some
basic rough soldering, but thats about it..
When I took the
engine apart in January I had to snip a bunch of wires! not one of my
favorite things to do..so now the time has come to put it all back together!
I cut 8 wires
total, four pairs:
2 wires to the
driver pickups. 2 wires to the
tender truck pickups. 2 wires to the
motor. 2 wires to the
headlight.
I recorded which
colors go where, so I knew where everything is supposed to go.
First up..a wire
had disconneced from one of the motor brushes! the wire broke
off of the small "solder blob", just from handling.. so now I have
do a bit of *very small* soldering in a very small place! I hate when that
happens..well, nothing for it..fire-up the clunky soldering iron and give
it a go.. itr worked!
and I didnt melt anything! *whew*.. I then connected
the wires from the circuit boards back to the motor leads.
Hooked the headlight
back up..just by twisting the wires together by hand, temporarily for testing
purposes. (I will solder
and "shrink wrap" the headlight wires for real when the time comes)
Next, I started
on re-connecting the tender truck wires.. the tender truck
wires are some kind of unusually coated wires..they LOOK like bare metal! with no insualtion!
but they arent..they DO have an insulation, but its a very thin white whispy material..I assume
to give the wires maximum flexability, because the tender truck moves a
lot..
I attached some
"normal" thin wire, with a plastic/vinyl insulation, to the tender truck
screws and then attempted
to solder these wires to the original "oddly insulated" wires sticking out the bottom
of the frame..
wow! I dont know
what that thin white whispy material is..but its DOES work well! even after scraping
much of it off with an x-acto blade, in an attempt to create bare wire, and soldering
the wires together, I could not create a connection! the electricity just
would not flow.. plus, my new
"normal" wire attached to the truck wasnt flexible enough..the truck wouldnt
move freely.. So after fiddiling
with this for an hour or more, I finally just gave up and removed the tender
truck wires alltogether!
So my engine is
not going to have tender pickup! I just dont feel
like trying to make it work anymore.. my engine is
going to have driver pickups only..
But!
this does not
concern me! because I just
read a very interesting article in the Summer 2008 edition of Maine
2-foot Quarterly magazine about
a new DCC innovation that solves flaky track pickup! essentially you
install a capacitor into the system, which stores up electricity..the system
then "draws" from
this stored electricity suppy when the engine hits dodgy track..allowing
the locomotive to glide right
over those sections as if nothing happened..its essentially an "electronic
flywheel" and it sounds
fabulous!
Its called the
"Lenz Power-1 USP module" and you can read
more about it here
and here.
So! if having
driver pickups alone proves to be an issue with this engine, I will install
this device! problem
solved..and besides, its going to be YEARS before I even have an operable
layout.. im just going
to gloss right over the pickup problem for right now!
The more important
thing is getting the engine actually working again.. tender pickup
has become a non-issue for me, for now..
So! ditching
the tender pickups for now and moving on..
Now I just need
to hook up the DCC, create some nice digital track power, and see if everything
still works!
problem..my driver
pickups are gone!
I was planning
on building my own pickups from wire..but then I remembered that John
Rogers, of Rogers Model
Locomotive Works, (who regauged my drivers) said: "Rogers
Model Locomotive Works will convert
forney axels, do machining or a full conversion. I made the jigs
for my own models and this is my way of sharing them. I
can also supply new bottom plates made from PC board with new electrical
pick ups."
Bottom plate with
pickups! thats a great idea! so im just going
to order a bottom plate from John! thanks John!
meanwhile, I can
still test it out.. just take the
wires that are supposed to go to the drivers, and attach them directly
to the rails! so I did:
It's hard to tell
exactly what is going on in that photo, so I will try to explain it.. My DCC system
(NCE Powercab) is plugged to the test
track in the upper left corner. Wires run from
the DCC, and are soldered to the On2 rails in the foreground.. the two "driver
pickup" wires from the locomotive are temporarily attached to the bare
wire ends soldered to the rails.
(just by "hand-twisting" the wires from the engine around the wires soldered
to the rails)
So now the DCC
system is hooked up to the locomotive! the moment of
truth..power up the system and!
.....nothing....
no response from
the engine at all..no sound, no nothing..grrrr..
its troubleshooting
time..
first, is the
DCC itself working? I dont have another
fuctional engine to test it with, so I stick a 12-volt grain of wheat bulb
on the rails.. it lights..we
have power.
So the problem
has to be somewhere in the locomotive wiring..naturally.. I inspect lots
of wires, don't see anything obvious.. I carefully lift
up the two circuit boards out the tender, there it is! a teeny-tiny
very small wire has broken off the circuit board! same problem as the broken
motor wire.. but this one
is even smaller! and the microscopic blob of solder it needs to re-attach
to is surrounded by other microscopic blobs
of solder ..this is going to be tricky! but..like before..it has to be
done.
So I again fire
up the soldering iron..I "tinned" the wire with flux and solder first,
then carefully bent the wire so it just touched
the blob of solder on the circuit board (this is one of those times when
three or four hands would be very useful) carefully touched the tip of
the iron to the wire touching the blob..and success! now hopefully
I didnt fry anything important nearby..
hook the driver
leads back to the track and....IT WORKS!! *whew*! amazingly
I got everything back together!
Thought I would
experiment with some youtube embedding..just for fun.. lets see how
it works:
