Chipping the Lima Class 117 DMU

I talked about the Lima Class 117 DMU a few days ago and said that I wanted to fit a DCC chip to it and amazingly this is a project that has now been completed rather than sat on a bench for days/weeks/months/years/decades!

With the body off the motor was once again revealed and a suitable DCC chip by Lais brought out of the WMD Stores..

The actual fitting of the chip went quickly with no complications.

Once the wiring had been soldered it was time to wrap the wire up and locate the chip in a discrete place within the body. It was at this point that I could very easily been drawn into a rabbit hole of a project as I could add additional electrical pickups, lighting both external and internal and detail the interior with a repaint and driver and passengers. However, I have resisted leaving that for another day/week/month/year/decade!

With the body back on it was time to test on the layout and given that I had cleaned the wheels a few days ago there were no issues. It will never run as well as the current Bachmann models but it runs fine for what I want and given that the motor growls there is no need to add a sound DCC chip!

A hesitant runner!

Having got one of my Lima Class 117 DMUs out the other day which featured in this post - click here to see that - I thought I really ought to give it a run just to make sure it was OJK before fitting it with a DCC chip. Placing it on the track and turning up some DC power resulted in a somewhat reluctant movement from the DMU. It was then that I seem to recall that the last time I ran this DMU was probably before the pandemic! It now needed some attention to get its decades old mechanism running smoothly again!

First job was to actually get it on the work bench.

Then it was trying to figure out how to get the body off. There were two screws under the chassis which came undone easily but the clips at either end of the body took some locating and undoing but eventually the body was off the car with the motor bogie.

Having got into the body the motor bogie comes out easily. It was very clean so just a few drops of oil on appropriate places was needed.

The wheels were cleaned (being brass they were both dirty and corroded) and the back to back measurements were checked and adjusted.

I then moved onto the trailing bogie which also collects power through one side of the wheels. Again the wheels were dirty and corroded and the back to back measurements needed adjustment.

With that done I put the chassis on my USA switching layout as my dual DC/DCC controller was hooked up to it and performance was restored.

I can now think about fitting that DCC chip!