Sunday, July 31, 2016

Wiring Update

Well it looks like the Russians have taken an interest in the goings on at Picton....the hit counter has gone berserk!!

Anyway, activity continues at a methodical pace with the track laid on the helix and all the top deck wired now for power. All connections have been soldered so its been an effort to get this completed. I have 2 droppers for every section of track as recommended to me by the 3 Amigos, Bob G, Es D and Ian T. There are a lot of droppers to solder to the bus but I don't want to be going back to fix bad power feeds in the future.

About to enter Picton Tunnel

I've also been working on the control panels for Thirlmere and Hill Top. They are made from 3mm MDF using DCC Concepts DPDT switches and LED's along with some push buttons to activate the electro-magnetic uncouplers.

Hill Top and Thirlmere Control Panels

Rear View

Next tasks will be to mount the panels and connect the point motors to the DPDT switches and then run the Control Bus. Then to the bottom deck.

I recently splashed out and bought myself a Eureka Saturated D50.




There's a bit of work to be done to bring it back to 1930's condition such as removing the buffer beam hand rail and step. Aside from the wheel splasher errors, I'm also not happy with the coal load in the tender so that will need to be fixed as well. Apart from that, it's a pretty good model and I'm happy with it and it should look a lot better once it's weathered and has some crew to grace the footplate.

So for now though, it's back to the wiring........................


11 comments:

  1. Hi Rob,
    Good progress. When the Ruski's were banned from Rio, they were told to look for "track" elsewhere. Maybe that's why so many hits.
    I have had 1459 from Russia as opposed to 287 from Australia. So has Phillips Creek.
    regards Bob

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Haha Bob, you'd think they'd have better things to do than port scan a bunch of train nerd's Blogs!!
      Cheers,
      Rob

      Delete
  2. Rob,

    As Bob has said, you are not alone. Around 1600 for Philip's Creek in the last week. I still reckon that they are searching for Hillary's deleted emails in the hope that Donald Trump will reward them.

    However, 'on a different track' (sorry), this is the first time that I have seen the idea of using a length of track as a bus wire at the back on the control panel. Is it something that you have done previously?

    cheers Phil

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Phil,
      The idea for the track bus bar came from DCC concepts. Looked like a nice, neat way of distributing power on the control panel so I thought I'd give it a whirl. I've used Cat 6 ethernet core wire for the wiring which works well. Hopefully, I won't have any trouble with it in the future.
      Cheers,
      Rob

      Delete
  3. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Nice progress Rob. Looks great.

    Yeah, I will probably have Russian bride advertisements pop up on Stonequarry Creek soon.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks Linton, its tedious work, I can tell you but I'm slowly making progress.
      Cheers,
      Rob

      Delete
  5. They are hackers trying to get details from your computer, be careful, I know a model railway shop in Sydney who had to close down his website because of this, his blog had thousands of hits from Russia, be careful

    ReplyDelete