Hi everyone.
While I'm waiting for the new ESU board to come out to finish my diesel sound installations, I've been working on converting my steam fleet. I'd been putting off doing my Walthers 0-8-0 switcher because of how tiny the tender is and because wiring up the decoder to the pads on the small piece of circuit board at the front of the tender is a pain. But yesterday I decided it was time to do this project, and it turned out to be remarkably simple.
Here's a photo of the completed installation:
The speaker is a Knowles Fox (9mm x 16mm - now discontinued, but there are replacements available from CUI) in a custom enclosure made from .040 styrene. It fits perfectly in the coal load of the tender, and I kept it in place by packing in some lead sheet around it, which added some needed weight.
The decoder is a simple fit in the back, and the photo shows how I wired it all up, including an LED glued to the back of the decoder for the back-up light (note that the wire in-between the blue and red wires at the front of the tender is NOT the black wire; it's the white wire for the headlight, with a piece of black heat-shrink tubing to insulate the joint). On the right-hand side of the decoder (the right-hand side of the tender) are two 220uf, 16v tantalum caps that provide keep-alive.
And here is a video of the completed engine doing a pickup of two cars at Lorain on my layout (pardon the clicking of the throttle in the background!). I think the video shows the excellent electronic chuff matching you can achieve with the LokSound (and which I've never achieved with the Econami or Tsunami decoders) and ESU's superb slow-speed motor control:
John C.
