Well, I spent about 3-hours working on hard-wiring a TCS Wow into a BLI K4 locomotive. I chose not to connect the tender, or the headlight as I just wanted to see if the setup would work. I checked and double-checked that each wire went to each of the correct places. Red for right rail, black for left rail, etc. All connections were insulated with heat-shrink tubing. I used a cell-phone speaker my LHS recommended. Well, the decoder sounded great, I pressed the buttons to play the different whistles and watched it move slowly on the test-track. A minute later, the loco stopped responding completely. I tried running another locomotive and had no problems, so the problem is not the DCC system. Any ideas on what may have happened here?
Thank you in advance,
Alvie
Alvie,
Does TCS use the protective shrink-wrap around their WOW decoders like they do their motor decoders? If not, be sure that the bottom side of the decoder is insulated and not shorting on anything metal in the tender. That's the first thing I'd check.
Tom
https://tstage9.wixsite.com/nyc-modeling
Time...It marches on...without ever turning around to see if anyone is even keeping in step.
cats think well of me I chose not to connect the tender,
I'm having a hard time visualizing this. All the BLI steam decoder installs I've done has all the "guts" in the tender and having the tether cable connected is part of the install.
Do you have the boiler off the frame? Can you get to the motor wires so you can read voltage at the motor terminals? Several, if not all, of the BLI steam engines I've had stripped down have a split-frame so you have to be careful not to have anything shorting the halves of the frame components.
Sometimes you have to step back, take a deep breath, and slowly think things through. Afterall, it WAS running. At a minimum, of course, all you need is four wires connected—red, black, orange, gray for the engine to run.
Did the pilot truck somehow get spun around causing an intermittent short? Not sure if this is possible on the K4 but I have had it happen on others.
Keep looking, the solution is there somewhere.
Can you post some photos of what you're dealing with?
Regards, Ed
Hello Ed,
I'm wiring the locomotive independent of the tender to start. The tender is a Sunset model, as it more accurately represents the tender 1361 used. I had the boiler, trailing truck, and lead truck all off of the locomotive when I put it on my test track. I thought I saw one of the speaker leads touch a rail, but couldn't tell for sure. The decoder also felt warm, but not hot, after I had the loco on the track. I didn't smell anything unusual, nor did the black smoke come out. Both the decoder and KA2 remained in their protective wrap. I also worked on a wood table, on a woof floor, in bare feet, not wearing socks. I'm taking the model to my LHS tomorrow to see if they can give me a clue as to what can be done.
Seem to read of this happening way too often in different forums.
If a speaker wire shorted on one of the rails, it would damage the audio output, but the motor and lights should still be working. If the whole thing has quit functioning, you may have a bigger problem.
If everything worked for a while and then quit working, you can be pretty sure it was nothing YOU did, as it DID work.
Mark.
¡ uʍop ǝpısdn sı ǝɹnʇɐuƃıs ʎɯ 'dlǝɥ
Took the model to my local shop, and it was the decoder that had gotten fried. They replaced the decoder so I'll be trying again today.