Progress with Zimo and early Xmas pressie

It has been a tad crazy of late and time of modelling has been a low priority unfortunately! Re the Zimo decoder, I haven't got anywhere near wiring up the LEDs. About a week after the last post I was pottering around with the speaker and found a crack in the case. Maybe that was the cause of the crackling noise. So I removed the area around the crack and glued back on a piece of 0.5mm styrene to firm up the sound box. Nope - the crackling was still there. So possibly my other suspicion is the cause, namely initially when I went to solder the speaker leads on I hadn't restrained the speaker onto something that wouldn't move and as such the speaker's magnetic was firmly attracted to the soldering iron. So it stayed for longer than it should of soaking up heat while I busily searched for a pair of pliers or tweezers to remove it.

I decided to purchase another speaker to see. While on the phone to Orient Express on Friday I noticed on their webpage they were stocking Auscision VR Walker railmotors, so I had one of those put on the order as well as an early Chrissie present to myself. I then promptly went over to www.dccsound.com (an Aussie company) to order a Loksound decoder with the VR walker sound file on it.

So I was very surprised yesterday (Monday) to have received the order from Orient Express. The railmotor looks very nice.

So sometime this week I will have to go out to the shed and at least wire up the new speaker and maybe run in the railmotor on Lachlan's DC layout while waiting on the decoder to come in.

On the subject of Lachlan, I found some time on the weekend to help him finish his diorama for the Club modelling competition in December. He also wanted to do something on his layout so I showed him how to make graves and headstones for his churchyard.

Until next post. Happy modelling.

Zimo decoder and 73 Class update

The only thing I got around to over the weekend was finally doing something about the replacement Zimo decoder that arrived two weeks beforehand!

After Club Saturday, I had some spare time in the afternoon. So I decided to open up the shed and test out the decoder. So I wired it up just to two of the pickups and the motor wires. And then I applied power. At this point with the first Zimo decoder, things went up in smoke! However on this occasion, we had movement with smoke from the decoder. Hoorah! However the dodgy factory wiring on the 73 was such that it went the opposite way to what I had assumed should have been the correct wiring. No big problem, just reverse the gray and orange wires from the decoder. I was happy with things at that point and left it at that for the day.

Sunday morning a thought transpired of why not wire up the little speaker to see how the thing sounds. The only time I got to do that was Sunday night between storms. After selecting the diesel option CV I applied the Sound On button (F8). And she cranked up. The speaker had some static going through it so I will have to investigate that. Could be a dodgy solder joint, or volume adjustment, or something else. But we have sound. Next step those LEDs!