ColinB

I assume it is roughly the same as a Tornedo. I think it should fit under the chimney, I tried it for size with a dummy one I have (I blew it up ages ago, so I now use it for sizing). You will need to get a small sugar cube speaker off YouChoos or some other supplier, which I think will also fit. Funny, I have just converted two of my Hornby A1 so that the electronics will fit in the tender, because I had so much agro fitting TTS into an old Britannia. You can buy all the parts to do it properly when I realised that this is one of the few locos that has a lot of room under the chimney, so I need not have bothered.

Where do you get the lower profile ones? When I was searching as mine was too tall, they all seemed to be the same profile.

That did actually happen with a "Mainline" loco I had converted to DCC. I had fitted a 6 pin DCC decoder, and the loco was running a bit intermittantly then it just started smoking. Sadly it is only a "one shot" event. As for the decoder I am still trying to find out from manufacturer why it did this.

On the occasions this has happened to me it is because the loco movement is not as free as it should be, on DC it seems to give it more power to free any restrictions.

I like the idea of smoke in a loco and with DCC you can turn it on or off. I have one loco with it fitted and a few old analogue locos from the early 80's when Hornby fitted it. I would agree with the posts that say it is messy, although the modern smoke oil is a lot better, a bigger issue is the heat, it tends to distort loco bodies.On the early Horby locos they fitted a foil protector, but on mine it twisted round and blocked the chimney, when I removed it, it distorted the body. If you could mount it on a metal chassis that might help with the heat disapation, but then you get the insides of the loco full of waste oil. As for DCC, my Bachmann A4 loco uses a 9 pin ( yes a 9 pin) DCC module made by Hattons, I bought the loco second hand so I do not know its history, it smokes well, but does not run that well, which is probably why it was for sale.

I use silicon grease on the gears. So what oil do people recommend? On the web it says silicon is best for plastic, so is a silicon spray OK?

Oh, I forgot to mention, Before you solder the 8 pin connector straight to the board, check that the TTS works, by running the loco with the tender top removed and the 8 pin TTS into the 8 pin socket on the adapter. Just in case there is an issue with the TTS, I have had two now where the sound doesn't work properly (TTS Britannia and Cock of the North).

Yes, I did this on my A1 Bachmann where the socket was in the tender. Unfortunately, because of the headroom in the tender, I had to remove the 8 pin socket and solder the eight pin header straight into the adaptor.

I thought you might be interested in the long running saga of this loco, I managed to damage 3 dcc decoders trying to get this to work on dcc, it works perfectly on dc. Anyway I noticed the DCC socket board had a fault on it and I think the motor connection was touching the loco wheel on bends, because of a large solder connection, hence how come it took a long time to find (and the dead dcc decoders, they would work for a bit then die). The nice people at Oxford mailed me a new dcc socket circuit board, so I fitted it, along with a standard Hornby dcc decoder. It works perfectly (fingers crossed). So basically once you know that the bunker coal is removable to reveal a location for the dcc decoder, and yours doesn't have electrical issues then the job is really easy.

I am sure there must be a post somewhere on this forum, but I cannot find it with the search. Does anyone have any ideas how I cure a noisy ringfield motor, it whines a lot? I have tried grease, that seems to make it worse, do I need to renew the gears?

Be careful, I found that using my H & M Duette it blew up a loco with a Bachmann DCC decoder in it. I think the issue was that as the controller was old it was using unfiltered DC (on DC the loco doesn't care it filters it). I suspect the peaks of voltage were too much for the ectronics, if it it a relatively modern controller it should be smoothed so not much of an issue, it wasn't with my newer controller. Must admit from experience I would change it back to DC to be safe.

There is another big advantage in having it in the loft, theft. It is really easy to break into a shed, whereas according to most crime programs burglars usually avoid lofts as there is no easy way of escape. I like the idea of putting carpet on the underside of the rafters, I am always banging my head on mine. In a loft you also get a much bigger layout, mine is 16 by 10 feet, which is a rather large shed.

What I am starting to do is to try and put the DCC decoder in the tender. I took Chrisaf's advice and looked up the Service Sheet for the corresponding model with sound, and found the corresponding part number for the tender base that will house the speaker. It means adding the 4 pin connector, but if you are going to have Tender pickups then you need that anyway. I damaged so many DCC controllers and valve gear trying to squeeze everything into the loco body, on a Britania I even managed to break the back locating slot, that I found the extra expense worth it. The only disadvange is it makes running lamps on the loco more difficult. Fortunately at the moment you can still get the tender bottoms as spares.

I thought anyone that owns one these locos would like to know this. I tried the gaugemaster omni DCC decoder and surprisingly it was about 0.5 mm too tall, how other people have got this to work I don't know, unless they shortened the mounting studs. Anyway, I mailed Oxfords and they came back with some US one that no one seems to stock here. So I mailed YouChoos, they always seem to know more that most people. Anyway they came back to me and said fit one one their smaller decoders, that was when I realised. The coal in the coal bunker lifts out to reveal a small slot to fit the decoder, it is obviously meant for it as it has cooling holes drilled in. The coder has to be relatively small but that is how it fits. Surprisingly Oxford said nothing about it, and I found no instructions in the box.

I was taking my Heljan class 47 apart to lubricate it, I found I put a Laisdcc decoder in it. Anyway it is a direct connection one with 8 pins coming out the circuit board, anyway, it also fits. I used it in the class 47 as there is minimal headroom and the Laisdcc direct connected one is of minimum height.

That is exactly where my railway is. Yes it gets extremely hot in the summer and extremely cold in the winter. In the summer a bought a big fan, I did think of getting a velux fitted just to get more air circulation, in the winter a big woolly.

I had the same thing with my Elite a couplr of years ago. I bought it second hand and the big red stop key had the end broken off, they supplied me with a brand new one for free. I suppose it might be the same as what used to happen in my industry, when parts get made the engineer gets a few samples before it goes to production, so if you lucky and you talk to the right person you get one.

Is this the people http://www.invictait.com/ it seems a funny firm to use for this sort of software. So how do you detect the train? I would be really interested to know how you do it so I can look into writing some software.

Is this a rebuilt Merchant Navy, I did a Google but couldn't find it? If it is, on my broken valve gear the right hand side is OK, but the actual value gear comes as both left and right rivetted to a plate, if you are any good at rivetting you can have it for free.

I suppose the other issue is from what I gather they don't actually make the stuff they "outsource" it. Some people think this is a really cheap way to do things, it is until you want something different and of course you have absolutely no control of the process. So if you want extra parts it costs you a premium. When they made the locos in Margate they were in absolute control of the process, so making spares was no issue, you just schedule twice as many sub assemblies. Most firms make all their profits from the customer changing their specification after a cost has been agreed, I used to work for a small firm that did exactly this ( quote low, wait for them to change the spec. when it is too late to find another supplier). I also heard that there are issues in China with the cost of wages increasing so it is no quite as low cost as it used to be, so finding a cheap manufacturing source is getting more difficult.

Actually it is not, they have to produce sub assemblies to make the locos, how do you think the car industry works. I know a car is much bigger, but in China someone makes the valve gear, someone makes the wheels and so on, then it goes to production to put them together, So no difference whether it is Margate or China. The bigger reason is they probably don't want the hassle of organising it and more importantly they would have to catalogue them and store them. That costs extra money. Given their previous management, it was a cost they probably didn't want to cover, if you saw the James May program they didn't even want to store the tooling. As I said in my earlier post, if it was an older model, it would not be cost effective to make new spares, but if it is a current model then no issue.

It is not going to quadruple between 9v and 14 volts, but I will measure it. Looking at the web, it is as I thought it just follows ohms law. So measuring at 9 volts all you do is interpolate using the real voltage. As long as you are using DC then the resistance is the same as the impedance at stall and can be used to calculate stall current. Torque is proportional to current. Current is equal to (applied Voltage - back EMF)/resistance. As back EMF is proportional to RPM then when the motor is stationary I=V/R

Thank you for the advice, the Zimo ones are much higher current so I will probably go for one of those.

Measured the stall current and it is 400 mAmps at 9v, so at 12 volts that should be less than 600 mAmps, so it looks like a normal Hornby DCC chip is OK.. I didn't realise, this must be a late ringfield model, it has pickups on all wheels. There is also lots of room inside.

I did the same when heatshrinking a couple of fixed DCC wires on my unrebuilt Battle of Britain loco. I had to buy a very expensive one off EBay. I now use tin foil around the body when I do heatshrinking.