In my experience it has always been best practice to remove the incandescent bulbs and go with LEDs. A few early installs I did in Life-Like locos where I left the bulb in place, including several E units, the heat had distorted the plastic and on some even melted the body shell!
Even if you left the dual filiment bulb there you would only use one filament of it since nearly all decoders today have lighting effects that are accessablt through CV selections at programming.
Many, like the Econami, are improved to make LEDs look more like incandescents by ramping up and back down slower, rather than the quick on-off flash of a typical LED.
In the E units where I mounted the Mars or Gyralight, I found it was pretty easy to snap off the top of the lucite "light pipe" and make an LED holder out of tubing.
I put black shrink tubing so the Mars light doesn't spill into the opening for the regular headlight (door). In some installations, I've placed a third, dimmed LED in the nose to keep the number boards lit when both headlights are off.
As I recall, I removed all the original Life-Like boards and hard-wired the decoders directly to the truck pick-up wires and motor wires. You don't need all the lighting diodes and flasher circuitry for the ersatz L-L Mars light simulator anyway, plus you can use the extra space for the speaker mounting.
This all takes a little extra time but it is worth it, I believe.
Good Luck, Ed
Neat idea on the hacked LED, Mel. I'll have to file that away for future reference.
Mike Lehman
Urbana, IL
mlehman Neat idea on the hacked LED, Mel. I'll have to file that away for future reference.
One more hint, ALB
Some of the Life-Like engines I've put decoders in ran backwards when I was finished. Some of the engines had a red motor wire as the — and a black wire as + !
This is usually no problem since it is easy to set the NDOT or normal direction of travel easily with CVs.
So, I suggest you test the wire orientation with a 6-9 volt DC source, it can even be a 9 volt battery or a DC wall transformer (usually the white-coded wire is + but check it with a volt meter).
If you touch the + to + and - to - on the motor the engine should move forward, then you know how to orient the gray and orange wires from the decoder to the motor.
Good Luck on your project, Ed
I installed DCC and sound in several Lifelike E8/9s. There was enough room in the loco that I left the original light board in place. I then fed the headlight output from the decoder to the old lightboard track inputs. That preserved the two filament mars light feature.
Ed, Sure enough... the leads to the motor were reversed from what is normally found and you made it easy for me to wire the decoder correctly from the beginning and not have to reverse the direction in DecoderProThanksAl
Glad that tip worked out for you, Al! As I said, a few of my early decoder installs in Life-Like engines wound up being reversed since I assumed the red wire was plus.
Now I keep a nice DC power supply at the bench and test every motor and make sure the direction is correct.
Thanks for the update Ed