Relaxing?

It has been a busy few weeks at WMD HQ and it is catching up with me. I need to relax a bit I said To Mrs. Woody as she inspected the latest work I have done on finishing off the conservatory rebuild. Marty the cat certainly knows how to relax - maybe I should take some lessons from him?

Anyway I think Mrs. W didn't hear me but is pleased with progress! Todays work was supposed to see the slabs at the side of the conservatory cleaned up and re-bedded in fresh cement. However they were that coated in mortar the builders let drop on them whilst bricklaying they took several hours of working with a hammer and chisel to clean them up. However they are much neater and lighter in weight and the bits of mortar that remain will weather off over winter.

With the surfaces cleaned off the slabs were lifted and all the muck under them cleaned out so that there is space for cement to re-bed them  Looks a bit neater already.

Those two bags on the left contain the stuff removed from on top and under the slabs!

Back with the Hornby Swallow Livery HST I dealt with the spaghetti wiring. Getting the body off the driven power car revealed this. There are wires to the motor and the headlight from the pickups on both bogies..

This is the motor end. For some reason there is black paint on most of the wiring around the motor. In amongst the wiring is a capacitor that needs to come off. 

Disassembly saw the keeper plates for the motors removed and cleaned up and the capacitor removed.

Cutting the various wires allowed me to solder in the 8 pin socket. Basically the socket fits between the pickups taking power from the track and the wires to the motor enabling the DCC chip to take its power from the track and then run the motor in accordance with the instructions it gets from the DCC controller which in this case is controlled by me!

The 8 pin socket is wired in to the motor and headlight. The 9 volt battery is a handy way of testing things. There is enough power in it to run the motor. In this case I plugged a blanking plate into the socket which allows the motor to run on DC power and used the battery to test that the motor still ran. It did!

The wiring was tidied up and with that done it was time to plug a DCC chip in.

Meanwhile the rear un-motored power car needed a DCC chip in it to control the headlight. It was a simpler job then the motored power car as there was no motor to wire in.

There is certainly enough room for the wiring.

With all that done will it run? I feel fairly relaxed(in my mind but not body!) that it will but stay tuned to find out!