Tornado TTS decoder

[doglane]

Hi, I too have model R3060 Tornado now fitted with the TTS sound decoder and speaker as supplied. With the loco body and also the tender body removed it's a doddle to cut and solder new wires between the pub and speaker, fix the drawbar to the loco with a 'o' ring glued on the pin below the drawbar then glue the wires to the drawbar.  No need for fancy plugs & sockets.   Mine took less than one hour to fit including the above mods.  I always semi-permanently couple tender locos this way and would prefer if they were sold coupled.  I use the same method when adding pick-ups to older tenders or even some railroad models. A bit of DIY can be very satisfying .

[morairamike]

Yes the speaker is too big to go in the loco. The round speaker is the weak point in TTS steam locomotives. I bought two for A4s and a Castle and one decided to give weird distorted noises after 24 hours even though never having had the volume turned up above 50%. Hornby replaced it for me but I decided to go sugar cubes in all my 3 steam TTS locos and any others I retro fit later. The sound is so much better and more importantly it comes from the right place, i.e the loco especially when mounted under the chimney. An A4 and Castle class are quite long and you can tell where the sound is coming from.

These speakers are not expensive either and can be sourced for around £3 upwards via the internet.

When doing your soldering, only desolder the speaker end of the wires.

[96RAF]

I recently fitted TTS to four large steam for someone and found that these iphone speakers sounded really good. 

They were alll models with the socket in the loco.

I have used sugarcube speakers in the past too but find the iphone speakert is clearer.

Richard

 

Richard - unfortunately posting a link to your own ‘commercial’ website is against the forum rules so I have had to remove it.

 

I have amended and reposted your post as above to leave the ref to the iphone speakers, which is a very good alternative to the standard TTS speaker.

 

Folk can of course look for you on other forums such as RMWeb and find their way to you.

Rob

[Phil_Spiegel.]

The days are long gone when Hornby was able to supply a conversion manual for the entire range - as they did with the launch of Zero-1 (and that booklet went through at least 3 editions I recall - I still have mine .... not that I used they examples in most cases.

I have been converting a batch of steam tender locos and Class31 locos from silentDCC (some ex-Zero-1) to TTS.

Most of mine pre-dated the pluggable 4-wire fitting - using mostly the uper+lower 2 contact  drawbar method (which can cause shorts)

Therefore I bought the equivalent micromini JST (1.27mm) prewired conncetors on ebay.   I also use 2 and 3 way versions for pluggable lighting