Sunday chip!

Having established that the 3D print fitted the Kato chassis the next stage was to try to fit a DCC chip to it. This is not something that appears to be common but there was a YouTube video of how to get into the internals of the chassis which was useful because looking at the chassis there was no apparent way of doing it.

With the chassis opened up the internals are rather simple. Two chassis halves isolated from each other and a coreless motor. This actually looked like it might be a lot simpler than I had thought.

The motor collects its power from the wheels through the brass pickups touching them and feeding into each chassis half with two wires taking the power to the motor. All I had to do was substitute the DCC chips power in wires for the motor wires and then solder the DCC out wires to the motor.

I did actually think about how the wires were going to be routed so that the top of the chassis could go back on The part of the chassis above the motor has some convenient cut outs so this is where I threaded the wires through.

The cover actually went back fairly easily leaving the DCC chip to be located in the cab space.

With the loco superstructure back on the Kato chassis it was time to see if it worked. It did, which of course I never doubted!!!!! I was actually pleased that I had managed to make it work as I had wondered if the chip would work on the chassis.

With that done its now time to think about painting it and getting it into service.