Here's all-wheel pickup in a Key PRR H10. It ain't easy....
These are brass import freight car trucks that I do a custom job on, splitting the in half and then rejoining
them to a styrene or PC board bolster, threading 00-90 rod into them for the pickup tangs, blah blah blah.
But you can do this with Kato or Spectrum tender trucks. The process is the same.
It takes a lot of patience to drill holes in the brass tender floor and carefully ream out those slots. If you use
Kato or Spectrum trucks, you can just screw them into the floor, using whatever screws and washers you need to make
the tender site level. There won't be any short because the truck frames are plastic. Just make sure the wheelsets
cannot touch the underside of the floor, and that the contact tangs cannot touch where they go through your slots.
Hard-solder wires to
the truck tangs, run the wires forward and solder directly to the motor. This makes a HUGE improvement
in the stall-prone behavior of these locos that depend on the springy drawbar wire. True, you can't separate
the engine and tender anymore, but that's a trade-off I happily make in exchange for trouble-free running.
A harder issue will be isolating that motor. I think you'll find that if you touch one lead to the loco frame, and
the other lead to one of or the other motor terminal, it will run, which means the motor is going to have to be isolated.
If yours is like mine, the motor is screwed to an "L" bracket. You might need to put a mylar shim or thin piece of Kapton
tape or something, between the motor and that L Bracket, and change to nylon screws to mount the motor. The metal
housing of the motor cannot come into any contact with the frame.
Lee does the decoders a lot, so he would know better than me on this issue. But doesn't that motor have to be completely
isolated?
...
Oh, and nobody addressed your question about soldering. If you don't know what tinning is, you need to look up some
YouTube tutorials on how to solder (there are many), and practice on some scraps of wire or something first before
you do this.
(In a nutshell, you need to wipe your hot iron tip on a wet sponge, apply a little solder, and get that tip coated with a nice
clean, thin layer of solder. You don't want drops or blobs on it. If it's got dark spots and crud all over it and the solder
won't form a nice, neat layer, you need to keep wiping and cleaning until you can get it that way. A clean, tinned soldering
tip is a MUST before you start soldering anything.)
