Sunday, September 11, 2011

Another 44 Class joins the Stable

Tuesday this week was our Tuesday Nighters get together and we ventured over to Gentlemen Jim's place. Brendan drove from woop woop to my place and then I gave him a lift and we then picked up Barry and Shelton. This was Brendan and Shelton's first trip to Jim's place. I picked up a new second hand 44 Class from Darren that he picked up at our Exhibition a few weeks back. It was the CFCLA version. On Wednesday at work I received my latest Tsunami D251 V12 decoder from my local importer. Thursday night I removed the shell and circuit board ready for installing the decoder. On Friday I came home at 4:00pm and went down to the shed and found an old 44 Class shell that I had on a dummy 44 class that I picked up many years ago. This one was reverse 4423. I also have a red terror shell that I could have used. I also found my tweezers and heat shring required for the instalaltion operation.  Later that night after I had done my nightly tooth cleaning and reading activity with Kyle I installed the new Tsunami.

Saturday morning I did a quick test on DC on the test track down in the shed and the sound came on but the loco didn't move. Maybe I didn't give it enough time to start moving.  So I switched to DCC and could read the decoder settings, so it looked like it was wired correctly. I then checked the headlights in both forward and reverse and they operated OK and the sound came on. I then hit the throttle and she moved off brilliantly. Good! In a couple of hours I was over at the Club for our Monthly Meeting day (actually the AGM). I put 4423 on the test track attached via a SPROG programmer to the PC in the Committee Room. My plan was to tune the setting on one of my other 44's - 4425 and suck the configuration down onto 4423. I was experimenting with CV20 and CV21. Previously in all my locos I have never set these CV's, so they were 0. These are for what Functions can activate while in consists. But as I have started to use the brake function on the Tsunami 44's, I needed to make some function work when in a consist, for example, if I had one of these locos as a non lead unit in a consist. So by turning these functions on in a consist, I get all locos braking, not just the lead loco.

So after setting up 4425, I then copied this configuration to 4423. I then took both to the layout and they worked together just like a bought one. So I returned to the SPROG track and then made the same changes to my other Tsunami loco. I'd be interested in hearing what other bloggers or lurkers are using on their Tsunami for their CV20 and CV21?

Today I spent the whole day at the School fete, so no Shed activity today. I'm absolutely stuffed.

This week and next I will be installing a decoder for a Club member into a powerline 81 class. This locos was from a wooden Powerline collectors train box set that our Club gave out as first prize in our raffle at our first Club Exhibition 10 years ago. A Club member has just purchased it from a friend I believe, and the box was still in its plastic shrink wrapping along with the first prize sticker. I will put a D13SRJ decoder in this locos and replace the headlights with LED's. If this goes to plan, I will potentially replace the red marker lights with LED's as well. We will see if this will work. This loco has a psuedo 8 pin plug on a circuit board that the bogies are attached to. This is really different to other 81's (5) I have decodered up.

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