I have been interested in Japanese railways for a while now, my Grandmother was a Japanese immigrant to the United States, and I have been interested in the country ever since knowing that. I have, of course, taken my interest to Japanese railways as well, and when I saw this DMU I liked it immediately. Not sure why, it is not really anything spectacular, but it is a neat little car. The KiHa 40 is a general service passenger DMU serving all across Japan, from when they were built in the late 1970s until today, with many still in service. This unit is painted in the Japanese National Railways vermilion livery, and depicts an as-built car.
When
@RBrodzinsky posted the link to the Japanese Loksound website,
https://desktopstation.net/sounds/index_eng.html, I knew this installation was very soon in my future. I picked up an ESU Loksound V5 58823 decoder from my employer/LHS and set to work. This install was simpler than I was expecting it to be, having just come off of the Life-Like/Proto 0-8-0 mentioned here:
https://www.therailwire.net/forum/index.php?topic=51306.0. This install was much the same as that one, but with more room, and all in one unit, not having to deal with a drawbar.
The first thing I did was put Kapton tape over the motor tabs where they touched the power pickup strips, and soldered the Loksound 5 Adapter board's power pickup wires to the strips:
The location of the decoder was chosen simply because it was in one of the two places where the plastic interior was wider, the other being the eventual location of the speaker, which for this install is an ESU 50321 11x15mm sugarcube. This speaker is enclosed on the bottom only, for now, until I decide to enclose the whole thing, but that can happen at any time, so I was not stressing it for this installation.
From this point, I soldered the motor wires on the motor tabs, and installed the speaker. This photo was taken during the tests to ensure everything was functioning properly:
The loose wires are for lighting, of which the lengths necessary were yet to be determined. I then test fit the shell to make sure that everything would fit properly with the shell on:
This was also a test to see if the wires were going to be a distraction and if I should cover up the windows, at the end of the install, with all the wires secured down, I thought that it was not too big of an issue, and left the windows as-is. Opinions are welcome on this matter, as I am not sure of what to do myself.
Moving on to the lighting, the light boards for this unit were meant to be DC powered with each direction having an applicable light on both boards. With wiring for DCC, this is just not possible, and I had to not have the functionality of one of the lights on each board. I chose to keep the headlights on the original boards, and wire in 0402 LEDs for the tail lights. The lights I wired in were warm-white, but the light pipes are red, making the warm-white LEDs work for the tail lights.
Here is a photo of wiring the headlights on the existing boards (the boards are removable, thankfully making soldering a lot easier):
Here is a photo of one end wired completely, the tail light wires fit through a small open space at the top of the light block:
Here is a test of both lights on one end of the car working (the functions were independently controlled, I remapped them in the decoder after all the lights were completely installed):
And, after wiring the lights, this project was completed! Here is the car running with the tail lights wired in, and mapped to F0 with the headlights:
As for the sound file, I used the KiHa 40 sound file on desktop station, which was a Loksound 4 file, I converted it to a Loksound 5 micro DCC file and wrote it to the decoder with no issues. The only changes I made inside the decoder were remapping the four headlights (front & back were reversed, as usual, and the Aux1 and Aux2 leads for the rear lights/tail lights were mapped to each respective F0 direction), and remapping F1 and F8 to the other slot, for consistency with all the other locos I have, F8 being the sound on/off function.
Here is the sound demo for the KiHa 40, featuring the unique two startup sounds, horn, and prime mover sounds at various speeds:
