Ok thanks. The reason that I went with tender pickups is that the frame sometimes doesn't get power when it goes over a frog. I figured that it would be easier to run them from the tender since the decoder its in there anyway. I think ill try it like that though.
It's not that hard.
First question: what happened to the orginal pickups? They should be fine. As to the tender, the trucks are a) polarized and b) connected to the body at the bearing point. Make sure the mounting point for the truck is clean on both surfaces. The drawbar completes the circuit with the locomotive.
With brass, the frame is hot on the locomotive, which connects to one motor terminal. The other terminal is isolated from the frame and connects to the drawbar to complete the circuit via the tender.
Rather than repeat myself, here is a conversion that I've already done:
It worked just fine after conversion.
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I'm working on converting several brass steam locomotives to dcc. I've converted one, but there are a couple issues that I have to address. The question I have is does anybody have a good way to pick up power from the rails to the decoder? I’ve tried putting a piece of copper to connect the two axels. This distorted the trucks and the locomotive tender didn’t sit properly on the tracks. Next I tried to use a piece of 30 gauge wire and wrap around the axels to get power. The problem I had with that was when I connected the wire to the decoder, it limited the trucks turning. Does anybody have any proven ways to connect the trucks to the decoder without them affecting anything?