ColinB

Are you absolutely sure it is brown, it should be orange. As to the decoder I would stick with 6 pin it gives you more choice of make. If you were in the UK there are many that are smaller than the Hornby offering. Funny I rewired all my Hornby 4 pin decoders to 6 pin. I suspect on this you are going to need "stay alive".

The North York Moors Railway is a lot more than a £1.00, I just add the cost to the cost of the day out. My only complaint is the machine you have to use to get the ticket. With the ANPR ones I get annoyed in that you have to go to their website set up an account and then pay. It would be ok if you weren't trying to do this on a smartphone with limited display plus dodging the rogue websites that are trying to get you credit card details (much easier to get scammed on a phone as all the information on a site is not easily displayable).

Yes you can and all different types. I bought a LaisDCC one, although people on here moan about it, it works perfectly. The big advantage is you can test a decoder before you put it in the loco, so it avoids taking the loco apart to fit decoder and find it is duff.

From what you describe it looks like the sound decoder. You have tried it in two good locos that previously worked with other decoders, so that says it is duff. Could be a ton of things wrong with the decoder but that is not your issue any more. Get a returns number off Hornby and send it back. Having a decoder tester would have avoided checking it in another loco, but you got the same result so not an issue, it just makes it easier. The thing I cannot understand is why is it that two supposed repairers pointed the fault at your loco when obviously there isn't. There again why doesn't that surprise me.

Not that I am going to do it, but this seems an ideal candidate for a next18 socket. So remove the 8 pin socket and replace it with an aftermarket next18 socket. Alternatively I think fitting a six pin socket and a direct fit Zimo MX616 (only because I know it works) decoder. Anyway it is possible with the 8 pin. I think the Hornby 8 bit decoder has too much wire for it to fit.

I suspect I bought a leaded Zimo MX616 and soldered on an 8 pin connector. The 6 pin decoder has a lot shorter wires. Anyway it fits quite well.

There must be room I did mine and I found those direct plug in ones give other issues, so I don't use them. I think I used a Zimo MX616 with an 8 pin plug on, I know on the Oxford one the coal load comes out and there is room. Do you know I mailed Oxford and asked them how to fit it and they didn't mention the coal load (I suspect the guy who designed it had moved on). I will see see exactly how I did it. Sometimes, don't you wish you took some photos.

If you have the Vref/Vcc from the decoder at the loco side as in the case with locos with the modern drawbar connector and then a function output from the same decoder. Disconnect the two wires from the firebox flicker that go to the track and connect them to Vref/Vcc and your function output. It doesn't matter which way you wire it as it has a bridge rectifier/diodes inside to give the leds the correct polarity. It is a shame function decoders are more expensive than normal decoders as that is the neat way to do it.

The firebox flicker is wired directly across the track inputs, well it is on the ones I have. You could put a resistor in one of the leads feeding it to turn the brightness down, possibly 200 ohms but I have to admit that is a guess as there will already be one in the circuit.

Don't you think I know that having spent years in development meetings, even at one point deciding at one point how many bulbs to put on an instrument cluster to save money. Unfortunately in Hornby's case that doesn't seem to work, they are currently selling the 8F at a more expensive price that the new Black 5, even though the initial design has got to be over 20 years old. Then we have the original West Country, can't believe how much Hornby charge for that one, but then again people buy them. Funny, I buy mine second hand and modify the tender and get the same model for a substantially cheaper price. In the world of cars most of the models had a lifespan of 6 years, 3 years to a revamp (new bumpers, headlights, electronics) and then a total redesign. As to the build quality it depends on a lot, German engineering is not that great but it is usually pretty solid generally because they invest in decent machinery, like everything it depends on the team that designed and produced it. As to the video, less said about that, the better.

Easy, you do it a bit at a time, I used to it with software, hardware and I have watched vehicle designers do it. If anything with the advent of CAD it has become substantially easier. In the days of drawing offices an awful lot different.

Hornby are not going to bring back production to the UK in any form, for a start they cannot afford it, they are significantly in debt. The Black 5 is complicated because probably they made it that way, who knows someone may eventually make one that looks the same but is easier to produce, that is evolution. We are beginning to see with a lot of the diesels that other companies can make a better product for less price. A lot of companies try to justify why their product is so expensive only to find out in a couple of years time that they can no longer sell their product because another company can do it better and cheaper, I worked for one. The Hornby class 60, class 56 are under threat and it appears Bachmann have produced a West Country as part of their Thomas range, how long before they decide to tap into that market. Who knows, probably eventually China will become too expensive so companies will migrate to the next cheapest source. Either way it is not going to happen, I just view the YouTube video as a cheap marketing ploy, people moan enough about Sam's videos, but this is worse.

The other source is the W1 drawbar, it comes with two stepped screws.

I proved that the extended time has nothing to do with WiFi signal. Now either you mis heard what Hornby told you or the guy who told you wasn't close enough to the product. As I said before there will be people chasing around for a better WiFi signal for no reason at all. Now you can lock it.

Why are you resurrecting this thread? It was locked, unless of course you want to prove something. In true Forum style this one needs locking or deleting before you guys embarrass yourselves further. That is the trouble with Forums everything is logged.

It appears not, there are many levels of pre production, these were the last ones generally used for press releases. I just did as I was told, I must admit I was surprised, we used to crush them, I imagine the tax rules must have changed. It was a long time ago so who knows.

Surely then if it is so few it is cheaper to put up with the difficulty in fitting the screw rather than a costly redesign. You won't believe the fixes we used to have to put into our engine control software to fix design issues, because it was cheaper than redesigning say a cylinder head and no we didn't do a VW and fiddle the emissions. I am still trying to figure what was in it for Hornby, get someone in that would probably be useless on a production line to show us how many parts go into to making a model railway. Just go and watch a Sam's video, he normally identifies all the separately fitted parts.

That is a bit wasteful, it was never that many. Sometimes you crush them because of tax rules. Just before I retired we were actually selling them, I got dragged up to a field on an airfield to reprogram about 100 cars so we could sell them.

I suppose because we were a big company but we used to have a Pilot Plant where we tried out new builds before they became mainstream.

I don't know what it meant to achieve, ask anyone that builds one of those kits for a loco and they will tell you how long it takes, but that is not the point. I don't know what it was trying to achieve, you guys moan when Sam pulls a stunt like that.

I generally do a search for M2 screws on EBay. They are Chinese suppliers so the items are always changing. Laptop screws, the link I gave you, do the better quality ones and they are here in the UK. As for the stepped ones, do a search for M2 shouldered screws.

Most modern Hornby locos use a range of metric screws. If they are not self tappers they tend to be m2 or m2.5, I have never measured the crank pin threads as those are special anyway. I get most of mine from China via EBay or a firm in the UK https://www.laptopscrewsdirect.com/. You can get stainless steel stepped ones for drawbars from China via EBay. The other way is to buy a drawbar that comes with stepped bolts.

Actually I just said pull it out and push it back in, sometimes that works, you have to be so careful bending pins, i don't even do it. A lot of times it is the socket, the solder crystallises and the act of removing the plug moves the pin slightly and creates a dry joint. Mind you it is so easy to disturb the wires to the motor without realising you have done it.

Please, please don't go there, the thread on RMWeb has just been closed because there were so many negative answers. If you want to up Jenny's YouTube viewing figures then go there, in reality nobody would build a loco like that unless they were doing it as a hobby. It bears no relation to how the factories in China produce them, if they did they would be forever building them.

If it worked with the Hornby decoder which has a maximum current limit of 500 milliamp, HM7000 is supposedly 1000 milliamps, so I doubt it is your motor. If your motor was drawing excess current it would have blown up you original decoder. Hopefully you didn't hard wire the decoder. Replace the HM7000 with the original Hornby decoder, does it still work? If it does then there is a fault with your HM7000, if it doesn't try it on DC. If it doesn't work on DC then a wire has broken to the motor. The other thing to check is the pins on the two decoders are the pins on the HM7000 thinner (sorry all my ones are 21 pin), this may be the issue. It may be that the thinner pins are not making good contact, in which case thry pulling the header out and pushing it back it, that sometimes fixes it.