Hi Dan, welcome back.
After my last reply, I decided to shorten the nest of wires in the bottom of the tender. I removed one at a time, cut about 1 1/2" off each and soldered back. That went so well that I decided to keep on going.
I removed the front weight and filed about 1/16" off the top left side; that allowed enough room for the decoder to fit between the coal load and the screw post. I then soldered an eight pin connector (#801123) to the decoder after shortening the wires by half, and plugged the connector into the light board.
Next, I installed a 1" speaker (#810054) in the molded area on the floor of the tender. I used a baffle kit (#810110) and speaker gasket (#810119). The baffle kit comes in several pieces to allow for various heights. With the limited space, I could only use 1/2 of the recommended height of the baffle, which had me concerned about how this might affect the sound. Not to worry, the volume and sound quality are still great. I placed a gasket in the recessed area for the speaker, placed the speaker on top of the gasket, placed one section of the baffle over the speaker using clear RTV to hold it in place, and finally installed the top of baffle again using RTV. Before doing all this, the speaker needs to be soldered to the decoder.
After letting the RTV set up over night, it was time to close up the tender. It went together okay, just had to be careful not to pinch any wires between the screw posts. After connecting the locomotive and tender, it was off to the layout. I fired up the NCE Power Cab and what an awesome supprise: it worked! I had to adjust many of the default volume CVs because they were to loud. Overall, I'm extremely pleased with the product and continue to learn new things about this decoder everytime I look at the manual. If you have any further questions don't hesitate to ask.
Have a good day,
Rod
After my last reply, I decided to shorten the nest of wires in the bottom of the tender. I removed one at a time, cut about 1 1/2" off each and soldered back. That went so well that I decided to keep on going.
I removed the front weight and filed about 1/16" off the top left side; that allowed enough room for the decoder to fit between the coal load and the screw post. I then soldered an eight pin connector (#801123) to the decoder after shortening the wires by half, and plugged the connector into the light board.
Next, I installed a 1" speaker (#810054) in the molded area on the floor of the tender. I used a baffle kit (#810110) and speaker gasket (#810119). The baffle kit comes in several pieces to allow for various heights. With the limited space, I could only use 1/2 of the recommended height of the baffle, which had me concerned about how this might affect the sound. Not to worry, the volume and sound quality are still great. I placed a gasket in the recessed area for the speaker, placed the speaker on top of the gasket, placed one section of the baffle over the speaker using clear RTV to hold it in place, and finally installed the top of baffle again using RTV. Before doing all this, the speaker needs to be soldered to the decoder.
After letting the RTV set up over night, it was time to close up the tender. It went together okay, just had to be careful not to pinch any wires between the screw posts. After connecting the locomotive and tender, it was off to the layout. I fired up the NCE Power Cab and what an awesome supprise: it worked! I had to adjust many of the default volume CVs because they were to loud. Overall, I'm extremely pleased with the product and continue to learn new things about this decoder everytime I look at the manual. If you have any further questions don't hesitate to ask.
Have a good day,
Rod