Well, the resistance soldering unit is an electrical short circuit. Yep, electricity and lightning, mixed with micro-circuitry. POOF! In dinosaur times, we had thick Ethernet cable up in the ceilings. This cable was called frozen yellow garden hose. Anyway, one day they decided to repair the ceiling with a welding machine. Blew out every single transceiver on the network. VMS + HAL (2001 Space Oddyssey) = W(indows)NT
You may be right Tony. I was thinking that the electricity would travel only along the path of the short. But I'd have no way of knowing what circuit paths inside the decoder are connecting the leads. Still... from what I read they use these resistance soldering units to repair pc boards., so I think it might work. You blew out your Ethernet transceivers because they were all ultimately connected back via the power supply's neutral complete the circuit to the welder's neutral, giving you a complete circuit. Hey Pete... what's your take on this?
My take? Hey, wake up, Pete . . . Ethernet circuits always seem sensitive to electromagnetic pulses (EMPs). A big welding machine--not a torch--creates a sizable EMP. I doubt there was a short. There doesn't need to be a short for an EMP to travel along wires, and fry a circuit. Lightning in the air near my house has fried the Ethernet chips (and more) in two Macs, which is why I went wireless. So an arc welder near a large yellow wire hose could transmit an EMP into the wires, frying circuits connected to that yellow hose. It happens all the time today. It didn't happen in earlier days because the components in the chips were larger. But if it happened in the past decade, that's my best take. Any signal processing component, which includes Ethernet chips, is designed to pass weak signals of very short duration. When a relatively gigantic EMP comes through, and lasts 100x or more times the typical signal, fried circuits are the result. Again, there does not have to be a common ground. This could happen even back in the dinosaur days.
Speaking of dinosaur days, my old RS-232C cables were a great source for small copper wire. A 25-foot cable with about 25 wires (fully configured) gave me 625 feet of wire. Man, I gotta start looking out in the shed!
:tb-biggrin:On a lighter note, I noticed Tony's age.:tb-biggrin: He might have dealt, early in his career, with some real, but late stage, dinosaurs. Of course, given the history of the dinosaurs, whether 65 million years ago in real time, or about 25 years ago in computer time, those were the biggest and meanest. By the time Ethernet was established, most communications technology for computers had moved to integrated circuits. If anyone remembers T-Bar switches, then you are a dinosaur for sure. Or cables as thick as a good-sized anaconda, where you had to call in a fork-lift to move them. Oh wait, that was before fork-lifts were in common use!:tb-biggrin: All in good spirits, I hope. Early integrated circuits were not protected from EMPs in the least. Hell, they weren't protected from static electricity, which is a form of EMP. All I can say is, remember the MIG-25 that landed in Japan in the early 1980s? Ridiculed because its avionics were tiny vacuum tubes instead of integrated circuits? The Russians were not dumb. It took the US a while to realize that.
The circuits are still not protected, wait for the next "big war" we will all find out. Yep gotta lov that 25, with the hand cranked swepted wings! Rob
Sorry Rob, but the MIG-25 didn't have variable geometry wings. It's wings were welded nickel-steel alloy and bolted rigidly to the fuselage. The Su-7IG however had manually selectable sweep.
Thanks Pete, Ron, and Phill. Pete; I meant what was your take on using resistance soldering on a DCC decoder... Russell's comments notwithstanding. I was kind of thinking of laying the wires on an insulator and using the open tweezers on each side of the join. No, the Russians were not dumb. They kept TT scale alive while we let it die here in America. Probably because the primary source sold kits and not RTR sets and rolling stock. I've got to tell you guys... I'm really jazzed with my new TT stuff. Unfortunately Tillig doesn't offer quite the selection of Bedding Track that Kato offers in Unitrack, so I doubt I'll ever be able to do anything as complex in TT as I can in N. By the way, if anyone stumbles across any old H.P. Products locos or rolling stock (especially E7s) for sale, please send me a message.
I don't know, frankly. I'd be a little leery. The insulator won't do anything as you've described it.
I have tried similar things with poor results. Picture two wires end to end overlapping on a piece of wood (the insulator). Leave a 1/8 inch gap in the tweezer points and hold the wires against the wood with the sides of the tweezer. Hit the current and the wire between the points is supposed to heat up. More trouble than it's worth in my opinion. A soldering iron is so much easier and faster for such jobs. Now soldering a wire to a metal tab on the side of a motor works great. Clamp the wire and tab together with the tweezer and heat while applying solder if the two are not tined. A lot of times I will tin things first with the iron then clamp the pieces together and heat to join like a spot welder. Liquid flux applied with a tooth pick helps things too.
