Strike whilst the iron is hot!

Strike whilst the iron is hot, so they say. However, whilst my soldering iron was not initially hot I did decide that having uncovered the Hornby duo of Class 58's I might as well DCC chip the motored one otherwise it would be several months before it got done. 

First off was to get at the insides. Unusually the body does not separate from the chassis, you have to take the bogies out to get to the motor and wiring.

First bogie out.

Second one out. I used the 9v battery to test that the motor still worked! It did!

Next job was to unsolder the wires from the motor and dispose of the anti TV interference capacitor which was fitted back in the days of analogue television.

Wiring in a DCC socket I had to use a bull dog clip to hold two of the models existing cables together before soldering the harness wire to it.

The rest of the wires were connected up and heat shrinked at the joins to avoid any short circuits.

I tested the wiring with the battery which proved all was well. Most DCC chips will run on DC so the battery is a good way of testing without full DCC voltage which could blow the chip if the wiring was not correctly done! With that done the wires were coiled up and taped before being pushed into the body shell and the bogies refitted. Then the chip was programmed and the motored loco, with its dummy, was tested on the layout. 

It runs well, just stutters on a couple of  points as not all the wheels pick up current. I may look at adding some more pickups in the future, but for now I am enjoying this pair running on the layout where they do look rather good - to me anyway!