My U-boat pilots are finally getting some TLC. I put it off for a while because if you want a sturdy 4-hose MU cluster these days you've gotta make it yourself, and it's exactly as tedious as it looks.
So I could put this with the New Layouts thread as it’s for the Kiddo Layout, but since I posted about these throttles in the past here, I’m gonna post the update here as well. When I first made these I was not planning on making the layout, let alone the control scheme I came up with for it (more on that in the New Layout thread coming soon). The original plan was to just swap out the wall wart power supply feeding this throttle for a lower powered one when I put a regular N scale train on. This could have worked on this layout, but I have other components that can make life so much easier with just a flip of a switch, so that is the route I’m taking things. In order for these to work as intended I needed to make a new pigtail with 4 wires instead of the 2 original. And I made them longer so we could place the throttles in a wider variety of locations around the layout. I decided to keep the barrel jack in the back so we could still power them with the wall warts if needed (and turned the old wiring into a jumper to allow for a T-Trak link as well. P.S. you can see the jumpers in the background linked together.
I started this SW1200 probably 20 years ago. Details, paint, decals, the works. The original WIP pictures are long gone and I have the opposite of a photographic memory, so I've gotta ballpark the date. But I vaguely remember progress coming to a halt when I was faced with having to make custom handrails and install a decoder, both tasks I found too daunting back then. But now I'm older and (allegedly) wiser, and TCS makes a painless decoder for these. But before I get to either of the things that stopped me back then, the kitbashed extended-capacity fuel tank is getting the gap filling treatment younger me skipped right over.
After finishing up my SP Sunset Limited project I went back to my unfinished project box and dragged out two Santa Fe cars, a bar-lounge-dorm and a lunch counter-diner. The lunch counter-diner used a Kato CB&Q dining car as a core and the bar-lounge-dorm uses an American Limited core kit. I forget who made the etched sides. Maybe J&J? The BLD etched sides were chrome plated. Dumb move, not much sticks to them. CA glue just peals right off and forget about paint. So I hosed them down good with my Badger grit blaster using tungsten carbide grit. That gave them a satin finish to give them some tooth for gluing and painting. Stuck them in the middle of the coaches on my Sunset to road test them on my hollow core door test track.
Some work about to go down Shiny Not shiny Santa Fe Yellow, No blue With Santa Fe Blue Just things EveryWhereWest Models
No… Just NO! This was the first and last time I do this… well maybe I will again now that I know better how to, but not any time soon! I was commissioned to instal a decoder in a Kato Big Boy, and I figured it can be too hard… others have done this and I’m really good at doing these kinds of things so this shouldn’t be too hard… well it’s not that it’s hard per se, it’s just not easy. The job would have been a breeze if I had a couple things in my favor. First tabs on the motor to solder wires to. That would have solved everything. But these coreless motors have wires coming out from inside. If I had shrink wrap tubing that would work on 30ga wire, it would have been a breeze as well. My problem was finding a way to prevent shorts, while maintaining the proper deflection of the front engine. I didn’t get any pics of the work in progress but I went and wrapped some Kapton tape around the frame of the front engine, right where the wires were originally positioned, then laid them down in that position and then taped them down to the frame. I then routed the wire to the rear engine, tied the grey and orange wires to those and BAM! I’m golden. I soldered the red and black to the pickups in the tender and Robert is your mother’s brother. No, I didn’t mess with the headlight. Kato really messed up on this model. It’s absolutely beautiful and runs awesome, but not being DCC friendly out of the box is a huge mistake. I rate this engine as DCC HOSTILE. I have found 90’s era locomotives easier and more friendly than this one. Oh, and yes, you do have to disassemble the entire locomotive. There are 9 hidden screws that must be removed to get it apart. here is the puddle of pieces that once was a Big Boy. Weight, and rear engine. Front engine and a few misc pieces. Almost finished, just have to plug the decoder in and put the shell of the tender back on. I think going forward I will charge $525 for the job. Then go buy a DCC/SOUND version, put it in the customer’s box and either keep or sell theirs and make some money back….
Your comment made me curious. How much does it usually cost to have someone install a decoder in different locomotives. I am certain by your comments that some are easy, while others are a pain. Thanks
Only 9? With a big loco like that, they surely could have hidden a few more. It's like they weren't even trying. Sent from my Pixel 8 using Tapatalk
For drop in decoders that require no soldering or modifications I charge $10. This is for something like a Kato SD40-2 or SD70ACe and a Digitrax decoder that already has the tabs for the motor soldered on. The same engines with a TCS or NCE decoder which I have to solder the Kato tabs onto will be $20. Others which require serious milling or extensive disassembly of the locomotive can range from $30 to $60 with my services. HO locomotives are right about the same, but they usually start around $20 because the most of the time the shells do not just lift off. A few well designed ones will just have you pop off the dynamic brake housing and plug a decoder in, I like those ones which is a $10 charge. This locomotive was not, and I do mean not decoder friendly, and it should have been with today's modeling environment. I will say that everything fits very well and the engineering in the design of the pieces was outstanding, just not decoder friendly.
I was a bit perplexed on announcement of the Big Boy model that there was no indication of DCC friendly which is why I ordered mine with DCC. I agree @Massey that kato really screwed this up. Most of my recent steam is DCC friendly and has come with some sort of connector in the tender for plug and play upgrade. Come to think of it though I've not had a Kato model that would be DCC friendly if it were not for boards made specifically for their frames to ease the installation. FVM, Rapido and now Broadway have connectors ready to go for boards with a non-specific manufacturer form factor. As I understand your installation notes it reads as if you wire the motors in parallel to a single motor output of the decoder? Curious mostly in case I want to swap out decoders in the future.
Yes, both motors are wired in parallel and I only use a single decoder. I talked to a guy who said he put dual decoders in the boiler, but unless you disable the multi point power pickups or cut the weight to pieces there is no way that’s happening. He didn’t tell me how he did it, as we are kinda competing for the same clients but I just don’t see a way with 2 decoders. The train runs good, and it maintains the electrical pickups from the tender into each engine and the frame/weight.
Cool, thanks for that info. If it doesn't need two decoders then I would hesitate to try a dual setup more for complexity reasons anyways. Good to have it running well especially after such a complex process right? It seemed early on Kato was going to use ESU decoders but then steered towards Soundtraxx. I thought maybe this was because it offered a dual motor output but then I learned when I received mine that they used a standard steam sound decoder. I would have preferred ESU because I have a programmer for them and usually every ready to run DCC I have received requires a bit of fine tuning to get them to run smoothly at low speeds. In this case though the Big Boy I received runs really quite nicely and was even preset with the 4014 address so as of yet I've not been compelled to mess with it.
Slowly homing in on a custom paint match for Metrolink's old bluish purple. Or at least for Athearn's version of it. Soon I'm gonna need a new piece of scrap to test my mixtures out on
