Hi Peter,

I use Del City here in the US for all of my bulk wire orders. They provide excellent products, prices and service, although I have never bought wire that fine from them, so they may not carry what you need.

Let us know who you went with and how it worked out.

Thanks

Thanks Howard, I am thinking seriously thinking about following up on the ESU wire as my first choice so I will contact my ESU supplier. Even if he does not have it in stock, he can get it for me in a few days. His prices are decent too. If you buy a decoder from him, you can get a discount on others and free shipping for a year.

Regards,

Peter B.

Hi Francisco,

I do have a few off-cuts of the adapter wire and I also left some slack in the connected wires tucked away in the tender body just in case I ever need to pull the adapter out from the body without having to disconnect everything. I decided that as it looks like I am getting into digital in possibly a big way, I might as well stock up on some essential supplies.

All but one of the local "Radio Shack" shops closed recently so I made several trips there to buy parts and pieces that I could use now or in the future. I bought an extra soldering iron, one that is variable from 20 to 50 watts, my Ungar solder station which is about 40 years old is too powerful for delicate work. The price on the variable one was about 80% off. My Ungar gets to over 370 degrees Celsius when fully warmed up, much too hot for PC board work.

I will keep you posted on the ESU wire, I will be contacting my ESU retailer today.

Regards,

Peter B.

Progress Report. The relay is in and connected. The solder connections are not very pretty as I am having trouble with the eyes today and did not use an arm rest when soldering, so the hands were a bit shaky...it is an age thing and comes to many of us. Have you ever tried turning something on a wood lathe without a tool rest, it can be a mess.

The next step is reassembly and testing.

Great! You will ser that it only becomes easier, you will want to undertake bigger projects, just go full steam ahead!

If you have a Lokprogrammer maybe you should research what a guy on the yahoo Loksound group is doing. He has put Loksound decoders in Garratt models and has tweaked his sound file so that he can simulate wheel slip between the two motive units.

After I had completed this project and had her functioning and responding to one of my Mobile Station 2 units, she no longer does. I took her to a show on Saturday, set up the layout and the Marklin MS2 units, put her on the track then she gave out a brief hiss from the speaker then nothing.

Today at the house I put her on the test track and connected the ESU Lokprogrammer and found all the settings were just as they were when first programmed. I selected the "Cab" and found she functioned as expected, all sounds, speed controls and smoke were all OK.

I shut down the programmer then hooked up the same MS2 that I used at the show. With her on the track, all she did was hiss no matter which loco position of the 10 I chose, even where there was no loco she still hissed. I deleted the settings for this loco then found I could not add the loco back no matter what I tried.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Peter B.

P.S. Should I start a new thread for this?

Good morning Francisco,

This is what I found. I checked all the Lokprogrammer settings and found all was normal and the loco works fine when I use the "cab" feature on the ESU Lokprogrammer. When I attached the MS2 to the test track all that happened was the loco hissed at me. I did a reset of the MS2 which cleared out all memory settings then as if by magic the BR 53 appeared in memory position 1 without any help from me and now functions normally.

It seemed the MS2 was confused, but a reset cured that. Hopefully all will be well now, only time will tell. I have a record of which locos were in each memory position so I can add them back as needed. I must say the new decoder is a vast improvement over the original.

Thanks very much for the suggestion, I appreciate it very much.

Best regards,

Peter B.