Model Railway Forum

Walkingthedog wrote: ↑Sun May 26, 2019 6:18 pm I don’t see why smaller should generally mean more expensive. That’s not the way most electronic gubbins has gone.

You’d think so, but if you consider the standard plug in 8 pin decoder is around £15 and a much smaller 6 pin would be about £25.

But that bit of research got me thinking (always dangerous ).............and I found a 6 pin to 8 pin adapter. That means I could plug one of my many spare 6 pin decoders into and 8 pin socket. Realistically I only need to connect four pins (two from the track and two to the motor) as I don’t need any additional functions for steamers.

Now I do have a few spare bits and bobs so I may just try and make one tomorrow.

Proof of concept, as shown by the wrong colour wires.
I unsoldered the pins from an 8 pin blanking plug and wired pins 1,5,8 & 4 to 1,2,3,4 on the decoder.
Seems to work on the decoder tester, test installation in a loco to come.


20190527_104845 by Steve Mumford, on Flickr

That’s a better installation.

20190527_112934 by Steve Mumford, on Flickr

Well done Steve. Where there’s a will there’s a way.

Now all I want is for Hornby to ‘shrink’ their TTS decoders to a similar size as there is still room in the bunker for a speaker.
Can’t be that difficult can it?

Is it a case for the manufactures departments, say the chaps who design the bodies get together the chaps who design the electronics and mechanisms to make sure it all fits together properly. All question of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing..

After my experiment connecting an old 6 pin decoder to an 8 pin plug I thought it best to get a supply of decoder wire.
Once on the bench it was obvious that I would be forever losing and then untangling it so I had to come up with a way of overcoming the problem. On my last stay in a hotel, I made a point of saving all those free pots of shampoo they put in the rooms, so I drilled a hole in the lid to feed the wire through and put the rest of the wire in the pot. I also added a neodymium magnet to each pot to hold it down n place on the workbench.

20190530_104532 by Steve Mumford, on Flickr

I started off by unsoldering the pins from a decoder to solder wires directly to the solder pads but even though I checked for no stray wires or solder the thing still went up in a puff of smoke. Retraced my steps with another old decoder (I have plenty ) and got exactly the same result.
Checked everything again, confirmed the wiring colours matched the pin numbers, but on the third attempt I soldered the wires directly to the ends of the pins.
This time no smoke and a perfectly working mini decoder for tight installations, but I damned if I know where I went wrong on the first two.

Just had quick look trough your flicker pictures, really nice layout, love the weathering, nice work with the turntable. Lovely modally.

Thanks Jaz, much appreciated.

Taking a break from electrickery for a while, I decided to use some leftover parts from the platform canopy to add one to the station building.

20190604_154754 by Steve Mumford, on Flickr