How to hardwire DCC into a Key Imports PRR H10w?

[spookshow]

Network Solutions must be having gastric pains or something 

-Mark

[Philip H]

I suspect as much.  There's not even a red X - just blank screen.  Which is a shame, because your pic made really clear how challenging isolating the motor will be.

[spookshow]

Let's try photobucket instead -



-Mark

[SP-Wolf]

Well- I suppose you could mount a piece of thin plastic (perhaps .005) between the motor and frame--but--the darn mounting screws would mess that up. Plastic screws-?  Or- epoxy the motor to the frame-?  Just thinkin outloud....

Funny- I am workin on converting a couple of Key SP C-9 Consolidations.

Wolf

[mmagliaro]

I believe that about a page ago, I said something about putting a shim between the motor bracket and motor to isolate it   
But here is a picture of what I would do.



I would expect to have to retap the bracket holes, because they are tiny and metric and you won't find nylon screws in
that size very easily.  But you can find 00-80 pretty easily, so just retap for that.   A .005" shim should not upset
the u-joint alignment.  If you are really worried about that, however, you can run a flat file across the frame there a few
times to compensate a little for the thickness of the shim before screwing the bracket
back in.

The trickier isolation point is the spring-loaded mount under the back of the motor.  But I think a nylong screw and a plastic
washer in there should do the trick.

The one wire from the frame should go back to the tender as one DCC input.  The tender pickup goes to the decoder as the other input.  Then the outputs from the decoder go forward to the motor and connect directly to the motor.  So yes, you have
4 wires between engine and tender now.  (And 6 if you want a headlight).
If you are able to squeeze the decoder into the engine itself, you can avoid the extra wires, but it looks like a tight
squeeze to me.

The drawbar contact should be completely disabled.  Just get rid of the contact on it, and use it as a mechanical drawbar,
not an electrical connection.

That's my $.02.  This isn't a drop-in job.  But just a little shimming, drilling, tapping, rewiring.  It's not too awful bad.

[carlso]

Hi to all

I will share my experience with adding DCC to a KEY Challenger. I have had heck with it. I did not know, in the beginning, that the loco had a short in the third driver of the rear engine. Well with the help of a RW member and fellow Texan the short was fixed. I originally installed a Tsunami, speaker, cap and headlight wires into the tender ( I'll post some pics later ). I decided to remove the Tsunami and try an ESU Loksound Select Micro. BIG mistake. The loco will not run with sound on but only with sound muted. That's another story and I have pulled the ESU and am reinstalling the Tsunami, with tripped motor control breaker, along with a DZ-125. I think I have figured out a way to add tender pickup and am fiddling with that now. As far as isolating the motor in this loco, it was not difficult at all. As soon as I can upload some jpegs, if you want, I will post some images in another thread.

If this worked, here is the torn down Challenger ....


You can see they used red & blue wiring. The blue goes to the left rail pickup from the forward engine and the red, just visible, goes to the right rail of the rear engine.

Next view is of the rear end of the chassis..........


You see the red to one motor terminal and the blue to the other. What I did, right or not, was I cut the two wires and left approx. 1" on the motor tabs. I then spliced a length of red decoder wire to the rail pickup red and black decoder wire to the blue pickup. Put me back to red/black pickups. I ran those back to the decoder in the tender. Then from the decoder I connected orange to the red motor tab and grey to the blue motor tab.

I also installed a Evan Designs micro LED in the headlight and ran those wires to the decoder with the appropriate resistor. Hooked up the speaker and woot, woot the thing ran and had sound. Following is that image..........


This part was/is rather easy. The next thing is to get tender pickup done. Where I went wrong was pulling this install and replacing it with ESU sound. As I have said before, with the sound muted the loco ran well but with sound on it hoped, skipped, cavorted down the track while sounding like a 50 cal. machine gun in rapid fire. Such a deal! I was told the layout did not have enough power. Wow, a 5amp and voltage on "HO" and only the one loco on the rails and not enough power. I can't quite accept that.

Perhaps this has some value to brass modifiers.

Carl

[mmagliaro]

Carl,
I congratulate you on your success with that Challenger.   And although your project seems to be very different than the 2-8-0,
it led me to do a quick experiment, discover something, and correct a fallacy in my thinking that I have thought was true for years!   

Your Challenger has a Namiki coreless.  I have some of those.  The can of the motor is completely isolated from the motor terminals by design, so the case of the motor can touch anywhere and it won't matter.  In fact, the Maxon coreless motors I use in some rebuilds are designed the same way.  Isolating the motor is easy, because the motor housing itself is not "live".

I was ABOUT to write here, that the Key 2-8-0 is nastier problem, because the frame of the motor was "live".
But then I decided just for the heck of it, to test it.   Much to my surprise, NONE of my conventional framed motors
have live frames.  I have old LL open frame motors, Kato, Atlas, all sorts.  And NONE of them are electrically live on the frame,
meaning that if you touch one lead to a terminal and the other to the frame, the motor will not run, no matter which terminal
you use.

All this time, I thought the frame of the motor was tied to one of the terminals.   And now that I think about it, I don't know why I ever thought this.  The brush caps are inserted into a plastic housing on the nose of these motors and there is no obvious
wire or metal plate hooking them to the motor frame.

My Key 2-8-0 no longer has its original motor, so I cannot confirm if their motor is the same.   But you can test it.
Take it out, and try running it by touching leads to a terminal and the frame.  If the frame is "dead", then
no plastic insulator is needed on the "L" bracket at all!.    Just make sure that bottom terminal, near
the support spring, isn't touching anything, and you are good to go.  Disconnect the motor lead from the frame,
so the usual connection from the engine and tender pickups to the decoder, run the decoder outputs to the motor, and
you're all set.

[CodyO]

Here is how we did it no need for fixing the L backet or plastic screws and washers



Bottom wire is frame pick up going back to the decoder
Middle wire goes to the bottom brush of the motor
Top wire goes to the top brush of the motor

No insulation of the motor has max showed, it runs perfect in DCC

Hows how we did the tender pick up with kato trucks

Wires soldered to truck pick up wipers goes in hole in the tender floor
No other holes drilled just 2 holes for super flex wire to go up to the decoder

Digitrax DZ123 fitted in tender

Thats how we did it and it works fine all you`ll need to do is drill 2 holes and solder some wires

[carlso]

Max - you mentioned the Maxon motor. I had one in the Challenger thinking it would be better than the original. I had a problem with an ESU decoder and in particular the sound. When muted the loco ran well. With sound on it ran extremely poor. Could the Maxon motor have contributed to that? I have put the Namiki back in.
Carl

[mmagliaro]

First,
Yes, following my realization that that the motor frame isn't live, there is no need to insulate it or change the screws.
As for Cody's tender mod, that's a good idea.  I never thought to just clip off the truck tangs and solder
to the pickup strips UNDER the tender, instead of inside it.  That does make it easier! (no floor cutting).

Thanks, Cody.  That's a nice fix.

As to the Maxon motor, it would be impossible to say for sure that the motor had nothing to do with
it.  Is that decoder relying on some back EMF detection from the motor in order to determine the motor
speed and therefore time the "chuff" sound?  The fact that it worked fine as long as the sound was off makes me think
that must have had something to do with it.    You could try using the Maxon again and turning back EMF "off"
on the decoder to see if that changes things.  Although the Maxon is better and more powerful,
The Namiki motor is not junk, so if the engine is running well, it may not be worth it to you to put the Maxon back
and start doing lots of experiments.
   

[VonRyan]

So I probably won't have to sell my brass K4 just to get the money to buy all the stuff need...
It doesn't sound too hard to do all the necessary work, and as of right now I'm up in the air as to adding a headlight, but I certainly won't be doing any major modification to the tender as I'd rather not risk ruining it.

There's quite a lot to take in, but mostly I've so far picked up that my best bet is to put the decoder in the shell if possible, if not I'm going to have to figure out how to get it in the tender and keep the wires somewhat hidden.

I have yet to take the engine apart, but I guess that I'll take a god peek inside tomorrow.



-Cody F.

[VonRyan]

Just a fantastic update for all those interested.

I have successfully installed a TCS Z2 decoder in my H10w.

I owe the success to a gift from my uncle in the form of an old Archer electronics kit of some sort, which had in it an Archer 40W soldering iron (with a pencil tip that actually tins) and a huge roll of Kester #66 60/40 rosin core solder .020 diameter.

The Z2 is inside the engine, on the right side of the gearbox.

To facilitate being able to put the engine back in its box (since I have no home layout, and run on N-Trak) I did not get rid of the stiff wire on the drawbar. It is still the electrical connection to the tender.

On a related note, I'm looking for a non-metal version of the Pennsy's specific tender trucks so that I can leave the tender as unmodified as possible. (I consider the engine an investment piece since I got it for such an amazing price and it has such excellent resale value)
I figure some thin styrene on the bottom of the tender and some phosphor bronze wipers on some FVM Std. wheelsets (No lo-pros, too unreliable) and I'll have a good solution to help it get over the occasional trouble spot.

I also found that I will not need a headlight since during daylight hours, the headlight would not be on/lit.




-Cody F.

[mmagliaro]

Is that Archer soldering iron one of the old type with the screw-in heating element?

I have 2 soldering irons, an ancient Ungar 9000 on my bench, and an ancient Archer for working on the layout.
Hang on to that puppy.   Mine is a 25w, not 40 (the heat was selectable just by buying a different screw-in element).

It is a wonderful tool, and luckily, I found some extra screw-on long-life iron-clad tips for it on eBay.
If the heating element ever burns out, I'll cry.  I love that thing.

[peteski]

Is that Archer soldering iron one of the old type with the screw-in heating element?

I have 2 soldering irons, an ancient Ungar 9000 on my bench, and an ancient Archer for working on the layout.
Hang on to that puppy.   Mine is a 25w, not 40 (the heat was selectable just by buying a different screw-in element).

It is a wonderful tool, and luckily, I found some extra screw-on long-life iron-clad tips for it on eBay.
If the heating element ever burns out, I'll cry.  I love that thing.

They no longer make replacement parts for those Ungar irons?  That is too bad. I also have one of those with couple of heating elements and tips.  One of mine is IIRC 60W and has a heavy duty tip. I use that baby for those extra large (non model train related) soldering jobs.

[VonRyan]

Is that Archer soldering iron one of the old type with the screw-in heating element?

I have 2 soldering irons, an ancient Ungar 9000 on my bench, and an ancient Archer for working on the layout.
Hang on to that puppy.   Mine is a 25w, not 40 (the heat was selectable just by buying a different screw-in element).

It is a wonderful tool, and luckily, I found some extra screw-on long-life iron-clad tips for it on eBay.
If the heating element ever burns out, I'll cry.  I love that thing.

The whole metal thingy has three screws to hold it to the plastic supports that leaves what appears to be more than a 1/4" gap of air.

It works like a gem and did everything lickidy-split, which helped sine I was working with thin wires with only a 1 1/4" distance from the stripped end to the decoder. My biggest fear was heat killing the decoder somehow.



-Cody F.