Phil HaighRight, it’s time to fit a stay-alive to my GWR 4400 tank engine from Rapido. The instructions are in German and the parts are tiny, what could possibly go wrong?
The decoder, an ESU Next18 LokSound 5, is tiny. The stay-alive is also tiny. To solder the stay-alive’s tiny wires I had to tape the decoder down to stop it moving, and use a magnifying lamp so that I could see what I was doing.
Having done the soldering I put the decoder back on the chassis. Rapido have left exactly the right amount of space for the stay-alive in front of the boiler, but mine jams when it is half-way in. Hmm.
Looking more closely at the stay-alive I can see that it is slightly wedge-shaped because the capacitor isn’t flat to the PCB.
The answer is to remove the heat shrink and there’s just enough movement in the capacitor to move it sideways slightly which allows it to sit a bit lower down. Cover it all in kapton tape for insulation and it’s now small enough to just fit.
I used JMRI DecoderPro to update the CVs. The stay-alive gives the locomotive 4-5 seconds of running without power, which should be more than enough to cope with any temporary power losses.
Anthony 🇦🇺🦘🐨🪃🌟✨️🕯🏏🧩🎭🪁@gulfie well done. Is that in N scale?
@skyfire747 no this is OO scale. But I have big hands which makes work like this very fiddly.
@gulfie I thought of N scale as that is all I have seen from Rapido in the past.
@skyfire747 I’ve a few of their wagons as well, and they’re really good. NEM pockets at exactly the right height for using Kadee couplings with no hassle. In fact they’re at exactly the same height on all the rolling stock of theirs I own. And I’ve rapidly realised that from that perspective they’re the best, period. Nobody else seems to get the height consistently spot on across their entire range like Rapido have done so far.
@gulfie I have a few Dapol* ones and they are terrible at staying on the track. They are way to lightweight.
*Dapol - Derails At Points On Layout
Tom@Erased_Citizen Yes it was, hoping to grab an hour to run and record some trains tomorrow…