Pennsylvania K4 Repaint

[ACL1504]

Tom,


As usual, simply beautiful!  My hat's off to you.  Fortunately you cannot see the glare from the top of my head.

Jerry,

Thank you for the very kind compliment. I have a glare on my head as well. 


Tom

[deemery]

Thanks, Tom, that answers my questions...   I have seen people attach motors with caulk, but I think those did not have the rubber shaft adapter/joint.


dave

[ACL1504]

Dave,

Happy to help. I've seen the caulk under the motor as well. It seems to work as long as it keeps the motor insulated from the frame.

Tom

[ACL1504]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-ogAhy6H7Q

[GPdemayo]

Smoooooooooooooooooooth.....

[Zephyrus52246]

Nice smooth runner on the video.  Thanks for the info on the tubing. 


Jeff

[ACL1504]

Smoooooooooooooooooooth.....

Yepper.

Tom 

[ACL1504]

Nice smooth runner on the video.  Thanks for the info on the tubing. 


Jeff

Jeff,

Thank you and you are very welcome.

Tom

[ACL1504]

With the exception of the coal load and cab tarp, this one is finished. Cab windows and crew installed. I'll do the cab tarp when the coal load is done.

[ACL1504]

I wasn't planning on doing a Wow sound install portion but several folks have asked.

I'll just do a short compendium or basics for this portion. There are many Youtube videos on this.

I forgot to mention I found a spare MV Products headlight lens and installed it.



I made sure the LED worked.



More in a few.

[ACL1504]

I installed TCS Steam #1516, Version 4 in the Pennsy K4s.

In the photo below note I bundled the Brown, Pink and Tan wires. The capacitor is the Keep Alive. The tan wire is for a cam wiper if you want to add a cam to the main driver. I've never found it necessary to add a cam to any of the WOW steam decoders we have installed.



The two purple wires go to the speaker. I'm using the TCS High Base speaker.

I soldered the red wire to the tender and the black wire to the loco frame.



I don't add the wiring harness to the decoder until the wires are all soldered.

More in a few.

[ACL1504]

The Yellow, Green and Violet wires are for additional light functions. The K4s has no tender light so I just bundled it with the others. Normally this would be the Yellow wire.



To avoid any chance of a short inside the tender. I folder the Yellow, Green and Violet wires onto themselves and then added shrink tubing to hold them.



More in a few.

[ACL1504]

The White wire is for the headlight and the Blue wire is the common. The Blue wire would also be used for the Yellow, Green, Violet, Brown and Pink wires.

I soldered a 470 ohm resister to the White wire. The headlight Black LED wire was soldered to the resistior and the Blue wire was soldered to the Red LED wire.



Its just that simple. However, I caused myself some extra, about four hours extra work, installing this one. I guess I'm getting old as I've never done this before.

I reversed the main driver so I had opposing polarity on the rails and the decoder wouldn't work. Normally I use a volt meter to check the polarity of the drivers on the rails but this time I also neglected to this as well.

I got the decoder programmed and it worked and ran fine on the program track. I moved the loco to the third or Summit level and zip, zero, nothing and so on. I took me an hour to find one power lead coming out of the Digitrax booster was loose. This booster controls the third level. Once I figured this out the loco ran and sounded fine.

Continued -

[ACL1504]

[ReadingBob]

She's a beauty all right!     Marvelous job.  Sure hope to get to see it up close and personal someday. 

I never could wrap my head around that resistor stuff.  The ohm's and what not is well beyond me.     If it weren't for current limiters I wouldn't be lighting structures.