potentially troublesome contact locations: the sliding contact
between the trucks and the copper strips and the non-sliding
contact between the copper strips and the frame halves. This
should improve your operational reliability.
9.1 Solder wires to trucks
Use a motor tool and a brass brush to clean off the contact point
at the top of the truck. Quickly tin the point. Strip and tin some
Wire-2951 and quickly solder it to the tinned contact point. You
need to be quick with your soldering so as to not melt the plas-
tic details on the truck side frame. Cut the wire about 2 inches
above the frame. This is a bit long, but I don’t want to be short
and need to redo the solder joint on the trucks (24).
9.2 Secure truck wires to frame with
3/8” Kapton tape
Once you have all four truck pickups wired, apply 3/8-inch
Kapton tape to hold the wires in their channels. When you are
done with this step, your loco should look like figure 25.
24
24: Close
in photo
of the
wired
truck after
step 9.2
is done.
tape covering the wire troughs running up the sides of the loco
or the trucks in place.
Position the speaker leads up the right front trough and hold
them in place with a bit of blue tape. Hint: you don’t need to
hold the motor wires down the same trough now – the Kapton
on top of the loco is holding the motor wires in place.
9.0 Wire trucks
I like really flexible wire to connect the trucks to the decoder.
At Litchfield Station we sold a product that has 51 strands of
very small wire to get up to 29 AWG. It had very flexible rub-
ber insulation. We called it Wire-2951. When I first stocked it, it
was available through Northwest Short Line. When they were
transitioning owners, it went out of stock. I believed so strongly
in it that I found an alternate supplier, even though I had to
buy thousands of feet of it. Northwest Short Line has a similar,
but possibly less flexible wire now. It is 44 strands, making up
28-gauge (part number 10010-9).
Soldering wire directly to the trucks helps in many ways. It
isolates the frame from the rails. It also eliminates several
23
23:
Railmaster
DS1425-8
speaker
mounted
in the fuel
tank relief.
DCC Impulses column - 14
MRH-Jan 2013
