01/09/08: Intermission

Virtually nothing of note to report as other projects and a holiday have taken up the month, so here is a picture of the delightful Swanage Railway. I managed a few hours away from the family to ride on the line and get a few photos.

For the benefit of those of you who have been curious enough to email me about my progress with the DCCar decoders, here is what I have learnt so far.

  • Whilst you are soldering one end of the thin copper wires it is very easy for the other end to get hot enough to unsolder itself.
  • If you don't get the copper wires hot enough to to burn off the enamel no amount of bad language will get electricity to flow through the circuit.
  • Compared to your finest soldering iron tip the pads on the decoder are exceedingly small.
  • Be gentle with the wires - even when they are firmly soldered it is still possible for them to come away in me ’and, Guv,
  • If something doesn't work double-check the wiring. Apart from making the wrong connection and connecting LEDs the wrong way around also check that the decoder's cables are correct. On one of my decoders one of the colour-coded enamelled wires was connected to the wrong pad.
  • If you think the decoder is small, the infra-red transmitters and receivers border on invisible. A magnifying glass on a stand or similar is essential at times.

Another interesting discovery was that when the battery level drops to a point where it can’t run the decoder the whole thing stops working. Now, I know that this is obvious when you put it like that, but when you are used to the normal Faller behaviour of the motor getting slower and slower until it eventually peters out then for your test vehicle to suddenly die on you triggers a reaction of ‘a wire has come loose or something is shorting’ followed by a panic and much prodding with a meter and disconnecting of wires. Ah well, I know now...

In retrospect I really should not have tried to do an all-singing all-dancing model as my first installation. The LS18 has had structural modifications to get a glazed and illuminated destination box, interior lighting and even a separately wired light over the steps. I have spent a lot of time messing around with this and it is still not working properly. Part of the problem is that I decided to use some really thin copper wire (salvaged from an old Post Office relay). Whilst this wire is about as thick as a human hair and easy to hide it is the devil’s own job to hold in place and solder. It is also very easy to break - I ended up having to hack away most of a completed destination box when one of the wires broke. I also miscalculated some of the wire lengths when I wired the LEDs up and have had to extend some of the leads. The result is that the wiring looks terrible and the body doesn't quite fit - rip it out and start again I fear.

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