I recently installed a walthers 130 ft ho scale dcc turntable into my layout. I am having a couple of issues:
1. When rotating, the locomotive's sound will cut out in 2 - 3 spots in one 360 degree rotation. I know about the "no track" area and realize it should cut out there, but what about the other spots?
2. When I wired the tracks for the round house and car shop, I followed the same wiring as my layout (yellow wire to left rail, black wire to right rail). Well after the no track area is passed, the polarity needed to be switched. (Black to left, yellow to right) or it would short out.... Is that normal?
3. I can't seem to find a way to manually adjust the turntable without using the pre programmed positions. Is there a way?
Thanks for your help!
-James
James,
I have the 130' turntable, so let me take a shot at your three issues.
1. No, the loco's sound should not cut out except when rotating past the no track area.
2. As long as all the tracks are wired in phase, there should be no reverse polarity issue. Is one of the tracks wires wrong?
3. I do not use any pre-programmed positions. I essentially have disabled the indexing feature. I just hold the control button down until the bridge track reaches the desired position.
Rich
Alton Junction
Anyone know what the cause of it cutting out would be? Or how to disable the indexing feature?
The cutting out at spots other than the "no track" locations are probably thew wipers losing contact. All the electronics are int he movign bridge so there are a lot of contacts on the shaft that all have to work for the turntable to completely operate.
I dunno about cutting out the index, that's pretty much how it's supposed to work. Once you have them all programmed, all you should have to do is select the track and the table will automatically stop there. Not sure why you wouldn;t want to use that - we do have a turntable ont he club layout but it's right at the edge of the layout so it just has a simple rubber wheel on a plywood disk drive controlled by a simple DC throttle since you can easily see when a track is lined up. Having regularly used it to run my steam locos around, I would probably go with such a simple turntable on my layout if it would be likewise near the edge, but if it was not easy to see the tracks I'd for sure get the Walthers one and use the indexing. Once set, it works very well.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
If the contacts in and under the bridge central core are in good alignment and clean, there should only be ONE position in the full 360 deg, a line coinciding with the necessary gap in the reversing ring, where the bridge rail power will be lost for a second. The line is at about 90 deg from the optical calibrator on the inside of the pit wall. This means that any time the bridge rotates into that gap, whether swining clockwise or anti-clockwise as you look down on it, when its axis meets and parallels the bar representing the dead zone that runs from one gap across the central point of the pit to the other gap, you will experience loss of sound/power in the locomotive.
Crandell