Hi everyone. Now that I have sound in enough of my road diesels to have at least one sound unit per consist, I decided to turn my attention to a bit more challenging project: putting sound in the Atlas VO-1000 switcher that I use to switch the steel mill on my layout. Again, for those that want to cut to the chase, here's the link to the video (yes, I know the rear cab is tilted slightly; I didn't notice this until after I shot the movie - since corrected, but what you're interested in here is the sound, right?):
/>
Now for the tutorial.
Although the VO-1000 is large for a switcher, it was clear to me that there was no way to fit a speaker on the frame along with the LokSound. So I decided to try mounting the speaker in the cab. Since my usual Knowles Fox was a tad too big for this, I went to a Star Micronics 8mm x 12mm speaker in the same kind of enclosure I use for the Fox: .020 styrene wrapped around the speaker, with a 6mm overall depth including bottom. Even this was a bit too wide to fit in the cab with all the window glazing in place, and anyway I needed to remove some of the windows for sound egress. So out came the side and front window glazing (I might replace the front windows with some thin plastic at some point, but for now, it's summer in 1957, and the crew is getting a nice breeze through the missing windows!). This photo shows the "gutted" cab:
Next, I needed to figure out what to do with the rear light. On my road units, I don't wire up a rear light because they are always consisted with at least one other unit facing the other way, so I only use front headlights. But on the switcher, I wanted an operating rear light. So, I cut off the round plastic headlight insert from the rest of the headlight molding, put it in place, and then glued a surface-mount LED (from Richmond Controls, with wires attached) to the rear. Here's a photo showing this:
Now I inserted the speaker (firing up toward the top of the cab), routing the LED wires to one side. Here are several photos showing the placement of the speaker and associated LED and speaker wires (I ended up painting the speaker enclosure black, but took these photos with it still white so you can better see how it was oriented in the cab):
The speaker placement also left room for a 3mm-deep chunk of lead to add some weight (you can see this in the very last photo at the end of this tutorial below). With that piece done, it was time to turn my attention to the frame and installation of the LokSound. I determined that I had enough room to mount the LokSound at the front of the frame, with some slight frame milling to let it sit at an angle. Here's a side shot of the modified frame:
As with my other diesel installs, I cut a small piece of light board off to use for power pickup in the back, and wrapped kapton tape around the frame where the motor brush leads might hit something and cause a short:
Next, I installed another surface-mount LED to light the headlight; the wire will run under the decoder.
Now I decided to test-fit the cab to see if everything worked out the way I thought it would (success!):
With that done, I installed the decoder on the front of the frame and started wiring up the decoder in normal fashion: orange wire to the bottom motor brush; gray to the top; orange to the engineer's side of the frame, black to the fireman's side:
Then I popped on the rear cab and finished the wiring:
With this done, I tested it on the layout, and (much to my amazement!) everything worked. So I put the front part of the shell back on and checked things on more time:
Front headlight:
Rear headlight:
With that, I'm going to rest until the new year, when I'll tackle some GP30's and more installations in my other road units. No more switchers! This was enough - I'll wait for Atlas's S-2, which I hope sounds as good as this one!
Happy new year, everyone!
John C.
