ColinB

To make them work you need some software which means you need to be able to program the decoder, plus I think there is a sensor that controls something to do with it. Hornby aren't into making smoke generators so I assume if you looked long and hard you could probably find the part but you still need to control it somehow. Someone did say they use the same technology in vapes, I don't smoke so I don't know, nor do I have one that I can take apart.

You can use x7355 which is the one from the latest Duchess. I think the wheel spacing is the same on an A3 or A4 so a loco bottom from one of those might have the same pickups. I haven't got one apart at the moment to check. When I wanted one for a Duchess without pickups I am pretty sure I used x7355. You will have to solder the wires on as this used the plunger type connections.

Looks ok to me, in fact very good. I assume that is the Airfix kit. I have one of those that I bought ready made.

I assume it is the 8 ohm you fitted, they do do a 4 ohm one. It should be alright as it is still 8 ohm. Now if it was the Accurascale sound decoder you did have to turn the sound down but you are using a HM7000. I was going to fit one of those to my class 73 but they had run out when I went to order it.

Trouble is this is Hornby, these will have a limited life span, once they are sold out that is it.

I know we all get carried away with it. The trouble with wagons is you need so many so if they are £50 each it becomes a limiting factor.

You forgot the top of the range battery Range Rover for the top execs. Has to be battery to project the right image. As to the wagons I never realised there was such a difference. I know I was buying second Wrenn for a while because they were cheap. I must have bought the Bachmanns in a sale, I can't see me paying £50 for each one.

Having searched around I found I actually have one of each. I must have got the Bachmanns either second hand or in a deal. Yes there is a big difference unless Dapol have upgraded theirs recently. The big difference is in underframe detail, the Dapol is nearer to the original Wrenn ones (which I have a lot of as they were cheaper). Here are some photos, first ones are the Bachmann. So if you can get then cheap the Bachmann is a better bet, although if it is running around a layout I doubt you see the underside.

Of course you do but you must be using some sort of DCC controller, to enable you to use the dongle. So you could just use the DCC controller on its own. The disadvantage of the dongle if I have understood it properly, is you have to define the loco in two places, the bluetooth device and the DCC controller. Now if you take for instance the upgraded Digikeijs running with itrains you only define it in the Itrains app. Admittedly you need to pay a fee to use Itrains now, but is it not that much for a decent piece of software, less than the cost of a DCC decoder.

Generally for any work you would normally get a quote for the job, hourly rate is not such a good idea when getting someone to do something. I suspect in the odd job man's case he probably doesn't get that many jobs, so he is trying to cover his downtime and movement between jobs.

Than is an incredibly big rise 33%. That is substantially more than I was paying for a plasterer and he was a good one. There again if you can't do it yourself the sky is the limit.

Yes but then you have to have a DCC controller so you might as well stick with DCC. They would have been better off upgrading the Xlink to have wifi/bluetooth.

Ok have it your way.

To be quite honest I think they have been extremely let down. They were promised this reasonably priced system, it is now rapidly approaching the prices of OO. Then you have that Hornby has blown all its money so there be limited investment in it in the future by Hornby, so half the models won't appear. Hornby made a mistake by freezing out other manufacturers like Heljan, but then that is Hornby doing its usual protectionism. Their management would do well to read the story of how the Shipping Container came about. Nobody talks about HM7000, by all accounts there is a rather large team working on that as well. It is also looking like the non sound versions of the decoders are not going to materialise. This means that you can't have bluetooth control unless you fit all your locos with sound. (The previous sentence now crossed out, is incorrect. The Hornby Dongle HM7040, allows Bluetooth control of existing Decoders) Would have done better to upgrade their existing products.

I didn't say they didn't Sir John proved that, he said he had no issues. What I am saying is with some it doesn't. As I said we have no communication from the user, so we don't have anymore information. Microprocessors which the decoder contains are very complex beasts sometimes that don't power up as we quite expect them to, sometimes in the "start up" code if you don't enable the interrupts and their masks in the right order you get some funny effects, so it could be a lot of things. Either way we don't know and I doubt there are many on this site do either. I used to write the "start up" code for many of my former employers modules so I learnt a lot, a lot of it the hard way.

Firstly it was TTS and yes it got taken in and out several times trying to find what the issue was. The loco was brand new so I wasn't about to change motors and Hornby would do what I did, check it worked on DC and class it as no fault found. I tried lots of things, filters on the motor but in the end I just used a different make. So far all the HM7000s have been ok except for the one that just died, but that got replaced. There again I have only used them on Hornby locos virtually all A3 and A4s. There is one fitted to a Dapol class 73 but that is a pretty standard motor.

Yes, but you don't order direct from Bachmann, well as far as I know you don't. I had a class 25 diesel on order and was informed of its new price via the retailer.

There lies one of the issues Hornby has. The Black 5 as with B17 has taken 2 years to get to market, the majority of orders will be preorders with Hornby so it will have lost all that money. Now if they only took orders within release day minus 90 days, they would have made more money. Announcing a product taking orders thus fixing the price, then waiting two years before you collect the money is a formula for failure especially when there are so many factors out of your control.

Just because it works with an individual's loco it doesn't mean that there isn't an issue, it happens a lot with electronics. I had a TTS in a Duchess after a couple of loops of my layout it would lose sound. Took it out of that loco put it into another and it worked perfectly. Put a Zimo sound decoder in the original loco and it worked without issue. As with all things in engineering it depends a lot on tolerance stack up, it is just with electronics you can't see it. That motor might just have a slight difference in its start up current which causes the issue., who knows? The guy that posted the original concern hasn't come back so he has either given up, or did as I did fitted in his loco and ignored his tester.

There are two sorts the early ones which are dreadful, you seem to be always adjusting the pickups and then the later where Hornby obviously realised their mistake and improved it. The infamous referred to the fact you get never get one as a spare. Even when Hornby rerelease this model you still can't get the front bogie as a spare. The one I have where it was broken, I bought it like that and repaired it, the others I have work ok although the diecast boiler does have a habit of separating itself from the rest of the loco. Probably some of that dodgy glue they used for a certain period.

I think it is because they give higher torque and are smaller. I think Bachmann use them a lot in their smaller locos. Having read about them I don't know how they work properly on DC but perhaps they rely on them being PWM DC.

It is the infamous Schools class, I have never managed to find a replacement front bogie they are extremely rare. On my one I did as you suggested, drilled a hole in it and used a bolt. There was a previous post about it with some photos.

They draw more, I have just read two articles on them. The reason you use high frequency pwm is that the impedance of coil has an effect and reduces the current. Generally the PWM has to be in excess of 20 kHz according to the article, at DC they look like a virtual short circuit. I don't know what PWM the HM7000 uses, it all depends whether the micro they use has a built in PWM generator or they are doing it by software. With bit bashing (doing it by software) as we used to call it there is no way you can get 20 kHz, but with a PWM module it uses the micros clock pulses to do it. Either way at start up it will look like a short, so it depends how good the overcurrent software is. It could be a board fault but I doubt it, I am assuming the person that posted the original post uses it to test his other decoders so he would have noticed. We already know from other posts that HM7000 has a slight issue with random over currents falsely turning it off.

Ok generally the amount of current a motor draws is offset by the generator effect which gives you back emf. So if you get a lot of back emf the current drawn goes down. With a coreless motor as you rightly say you don't get any back emf, so therefore they must use more current. You further endorse that by saying that they get heat build up. What causes heat build up volts multiplied by amps, so I assume you avoid overheating by adjusting the mark/space ratio on the PWM. I won't pull rank but lets say I know a little bit about electronics especially PWM (we used it to control lots of things on a vehicle engine). I will be honest my motor knowledge is a bit limited I just did the labs and wrote up the reports but I did read the journal on how they worked and the issues with them. Either way as I said look at that board and assuming it hasn't got a fault, tell me what you think is causing the issue.

As I said on the other response, what else is there on that board to cause a failure, perhaps your coreless motor is a different rating. If I remember rightly Zimo actually state in their specification that their decoders are happy with coreless motors, if there wasn't an issue with them why would they state that. Doesn't one of the analogue controls have an issue with coreless motors and feedback control, I am sure I have heard Sam mention it. Bachmann use a lot of coreless motors but generally I use a Zimo decoder to control them so I don't know how a HM7000 will perform.