Track and electrical/DCC
Can someone fill me in on the proper use for Kapton Tape.....?
Having read in so many articles about Kapton tape, I finally bought some. I then looked it up on the Web, and it seems it's used for assembly of components on PCB's as well as an insulating shield against shorts. I assumed it was like a super thin black electrical tape. It's not. I tried using it to wrap soldered wires but it would not stick or wrap. As it's so thin, I tried to wrap an LED I had sanded the base off so it would fit into a hole in my headlight to insulate the anode and cathode from contacting the brass, as black tape was too thick
help needed with Digitrax DZ143 in Con-Cor P54 coach
Took it out of the box and it runs fine but the headlights won't come on. CV 33 set to 1 and 34 set to 2. Any suggestions?
Crazy idea? 3D printed turntable pit
I started drawing a trestle to see how the parts would fit together. One thing led to another, and I decided to draw an entire turntable pit, retaining wall (there's no pit wall on my prototype) and runoff trestle as a single piece. Shapeways says they can print it, and with the holiday sale going on it ought to be in the $40-$45 range.
Wholesale Trains
Has anyone ordered from Wholesale Trains ? I am in the process for shopping to get a NCE Power Cab and it seems that they have the best price for $143.99. So I wanted to know if anyone in the group have experienced ordering from them.
Thank you in advance.
Advance Consisting Question
I have a question concerning Advance Consisting. As I understand it, an engine will respond to its normal address if CV19 is 0; however when CV19 is changed to the consist value (1-127, Bit 7 used for direction control) the decoder knows it is in a consist. As long as CV19 is not 0 the engine will not respond to speed commands using the engines normal address.
MRC Tech 6 6.0 Sound Controller
I have recently purchased the MRC Tech 6 6.0 Sound Controller with the intent of using sound on my DC HO layout. I have not yet installed it on my layout, but before I do I suspect that green and red DC LED'S I have wired across the tracks in multiple blocks to indicate 'polarity' of a specified block, and therefore indicating if a train can continue moving forward into that block, after leaving its current block, might be in danger of 'burning out' if an AC voltage is applied to them by the MRC Controller. My question is then will an LED withstand an AC voltage?
DCC wiring question about occupancy detection
Typically, I run a separate PAIR of wires for each section of track that I want to detect occupancy on. This ends up with me having as much wire under the layout as rail above the layout. The question I have is: If I am feeding all of the DCC blocks from the same source, can I run a single common wire and just run single wires for each block that I want to detect current draw from? This would save quite a bit of redundant wire under my layout.
Thanks,
Ryan
Where to put gaps on a dead frog ME turnout crossover
I'm using a pair of ME #6 turnouts to make a crossover between 2 parallel tracks. I've always used live frogs in the past and wired feeders to the points end of the turnout and gapped the other end of the turnout. Maybe I'm over-thinking this, but do I still need to put gaps between the two turnouts where they connect. Will that cause a short with dead frog turnouts?
Anyone tried to fix dt300 with bad capacitor issue?
At our modular club's last show, someone picked up an old dt300 throttle and found the display to flash between the voltage display and the hexadecimal display every second or so. Doing a quick search with my phone, this turns out to be a common issue caused by bad capacitors being installed when the throttles were made (NOT Digitrax's fault at all). I read it would cost about $35 to send the throttles back to Digitrax to repair (we have two of them), which is a bit much for our club, especially since these throttles get very little use.
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