The holidays over, I've got down to business on adding decoders / sound to some locos and thought I'd post some videos for any who care to have a look.
A couple are not shown here, but I may edit them in if I get to it in the next day or so. First was replacing a LokSound in a LL P2K GP60 (has 4 sugarcubes) that acted up. Next was converting a LL P2K GP30 to LokSound and 3 sugarcubes. Need to video those.
So, here's the first video of today. An Atlas DC Silver Series (2015) RS1 where a LokSound Select and twin 13x18mm Knowles Grand sugarcubes added. I think I got this one right. Nil horn distortion, which some of my sugarcubes conversions have exhibited. Sorry if the video quality is mediocre (shake plus focus loss). See the youtube video commentary (there) also if you like:
Next (actually the day before), exhibiting a converted LL P2k SD7 where a LokSound Select (6Aux) was added, with 4 13x18mm sugarcubes. There's some speaker distortion with the horn, which I'm guessing may be due to being lazy with a 0.015" styrene enclosure floor (instead of 0.040"), wiring vibration atop the speaker back), not sufficiently gluing the enclosure down. or imperfect enclosure sealing (I glue things with superglue and supplement by smearing silicon on joints). This SD7 is compared (apples & oranges in many respects) with a sound equipped BLI Paragon 2 SD7.
EDIT (Jan 26): I've replaced the original SD7s video with an extended version. As explained above the converted P2K horn sounded distorted so i decided to go in and experiment with the speaker enclosure. But a first experiment in switching the horn selection from the default (Baldwin switcher per the Select manual) to others made the problem go away. I can't be certain that it was a lesser quality sound clip for the horn default, or horn frequencies the sugarcubes don't handle, but I suspect the former since 4 others I tried worked fine. I wanted to add an update that show the difference between the default horn (middle of the video) and another horn selection (last portion).
Hoping the video inserts work...haven't done this in awhile.
Paul
Modeling HO with a transition era UP bent
Very nice.
What would be very nice would be a series of photos of the actual install.
Rich
If you ever fall over in public, pick yourself up and say “sorry it’s been a while since I inhabited a body.” And just walk away.
richg1998 Very nice. What would be very nice would be a series of photos of the actual install. Rich
Alton Junction
Sorry not to have captured the steps involved, but I've opened them up to show the "after" innerds. Click on the photos to expand to larger size, much easier to see the details.
Here's the LL P2K SD7. The 6Aux decoder sits neatly atop the motor (on a piece of styrene). The weight was milled down somewhat below the speaker enclosure. The lights are 5mm warm white LEDs.
Here's the RS1. You can see where the metal verticals near the long hood truck were ground down to allow a reasonable speaker enclosure height, 9mm. The original long hood light pipe / speaker enclosure was removed and a 0603 SMD LED glued to the lens. I left much of the wiring too long, may remove some. I got some Soundtraxx mini connectors that I may try out.
That second loco in the video, #776, is the hands down winner!