Bachmann OO WD 2-8-0 sound installation

 

My Bachmann WD 2-8-0 model was hard-wired for DCC operation. 

Now I’ve decided to upgrade to sound. The loco has no space in the boiler, so I will to take the pickups and motor wires back into the tender. By removing some of the sloping plastic from underneath the coal load to create a bit more room for an 8 pin socket a couple of 15X11mm ESU 'sugarcube' 8 ohm speakers  connected in parallel will give a 4 ohm load sighted towards the rear of the tender my selected chip will be a Zimo MS450 from my preferred suppler YouChoos. 

Check the speaker for a correct fit each side of the tender mounting pillar. I then glued the sugarcubes on a strip of 20thou plastic card stuck down with double sided tape.  An 8 Pin DCC compact socket from illuminated_models  is screwed to the metal weight I tapped the plate with a 3mm thread sitting on some plastic standoffs making sure the underside of the socket is insulated from the metal weight 20thou plastic card stuck down with double sided tape was used.

The route for the 4 wires from the loco to tender is via a hole drilled in the curved back of the chassis pickup assembly I left the wires long roughly to the site where the sugarcubes, having dipped the ends in the correct colour paint for identification! A hole was drilled in front of the mounting pillar then the wires threaded through the large hole in the metal weight. 

Now it’s just a case of plugging in the decoder I used a cheap redundant non sound decoder to test, I guess you could prove the wiring by using a blanking plug.

10/03/2023 Sound chip arrived I wired the speakers and tested on my ESU 53900 rig and reset the chip ID to 3085. All that was left to do was to plug the chip into the tender tidy the umbilical cables between the loco and tender and screw the tender together. I’m very pleased with the end result