Katzhagen - Archive - October 2011
Early shift
Do you also fall out of bed sometimes at four o'clock in the morning feeling an urgent craving for a soldering iron ? If so, then we share the symptoms of pre-senile bed-escape. After ammunitioning the coffee urn the following was kicked off...Parking lights for the Thusis - or: The early bird switches the lights on
Since this RhB Ge4/4 II was an old LGB model (1993) and the folks at Nuremberg hadn't had the idea of disabling the motors seperately at that time, the model's illumination remained dark in the shelf - unluminous.The reason for this was the constant voltage of 13V on the shelf's track. As a result the power enabled loco would have gone through the wall... I wanted to change this since years ... and on this morning the perfect moment finally doing it seemed to have come.
First the eight screws on the engine's bottom side were unscrewed to remove the loco's housing. Next a suitable solution for a minimally invasive operation modifying the wiring had to be found. To much of my astonishment, the motors featured just three instead of four contacts - which I never noticed before. This meant that the mode switch was connected to a single contact of the motors and the lights only. Good luck - only a the single line feeding the motors had to be interrupted by an additional switch. The most simple method to achieve this goal was to cut a trace on the little board feeding the motors with power and to add a switch here... Nurse, scalpel !
End of prose, here are the pictures...
First a hole with a diameter of 6mm was drilled for the additional switch
Board feeding power to both of the motors
Motor switch mounted
No risk of knotting - Wiring between switch and board
The switch ekes out its inconspicuous existance inside the second driver's cab.
The cables connect the switch to the board's cut traces.
Insight into the second cab after this little operation was finished
This exactly is what I had envisioned !
September 2011 | Archive "Current Affairs" | November 2011
