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 My family’s Christmas, er, New Year’s layout, Shogatsu, has been retired for the year. We haul it out of the basement for only a couple months each year, around New Year’s, to work on it and display it. This year’s time is up. We made some small progress on it, especially in forestation and village construction. New concrete retaining walls were built, and our village received a bath-house, a liquor store, a long string of merchant stalls for the New Year’s festival, and a portable shrine being hauled down the main street. It also received a new bit of rolling stock, a Tomytec モ1030.
Before we packed it up last weekend, I made a video of it, below.
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 It lives! Tomix EF81 with working DCC provided by a TCS CN-GP. [Update 7 July 2010: The decoder failed by February. TCS advised that the CN-GP is a very delicate decoder; consequently, I cannot recommend this installation method. Currently looking for a new method of installation. Watch for future posts.]
Read Part 1.
It’s done. Well, almost. [Update 10 Jan 2010: Yep, it's done.] Anyway, it works, and that’s what counts. Here then I recount the two hours I spent last night making it work, and the year of effort that culminated in those two glorious hours. (Yes, it takes me about one year to install one decoder. No, I’m not that slow: it’s just a function of how much free time I have, and how I choose to spend it.)
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This has been an awful week, for reasons I won’t dwell on. But as is often the case, I attempted to wrest control over my life by relaxing with my trains this weekend. And, as is increasingly the case, this attempt led me only to frustration.
Before me are four models that have issues. (My weekend began [...]
I’ve lost track of how many decoders have been fried in the name of getting my Tomix EF81 converted to DCC. I’m not at all sure what happened this time; I was very thorough in checking for shorts before I put it on the tracks. And, sure enough, when I power it up, it shorts and [...]
I’ve been out of commission for a while, haven’t I? My wife had jury duty nearly all of this past week, which made me primary care-taker for our little daughter. I understood in only an abstract sense the amount of work Amy does in caring for our child; I understand now in a much more concrete sense. I also know that I would be a terrible single father. I really rely on her, and I’m incredibly thankful to have someone I can rely on as my partner.
Thank you, Amy.
This weekend, however, I’ve gotten quite a lot of modeling work done; here is a brief overview (with, perhaps, more detailed posts to follow over the coming week). Continue reading…
Not with the website, thank goodness. No, today I fried another decoder. According to Arthur at TCS, the CN-GP is rather sensitive to shorting, and that’s just what I did. So, it’s off for testing and replacement! The good news is, I shorted it out during a test-fitting, and so far it looks like it’s going [...]
 Tomix EF81 “Hokutosei”
Here’s today’s subject: A Tomix EF81. This one, no. 98, is a special edition, not easily replaceable—and not DCC-ready, either. In this article, I will cover how to disassemble the locomotive—which is very easy—, and mill the frame to fit a TCS CN-GP decoder—which isn’t terribly hard.
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Yes, I’m alive. Indeed, I’m almost half-way finished milling my Tomix EF81 frame. More on that later.
I suppose that I am not supposed to like Harbor Freight, since their business solely involves importing cheaply made Chinese goods. Yet, I do. Today, I walked in with a short list of things to buy, and a reasonable budget. [...]
Well, I got my TCS CN-GP decoder in. I won’t get around to installing it until January at the earliest, but I did take the EF81 it’s destined for apart to see how much work it will take to fit it.
Let me say something about the decoder first. It’s designed to ease the process of converting [...]
Stevenh has designed his own DCC booster from scratch. How cool is that? Better yet, it works with a PC, and he has several for sale. Best of all, he uses his custom booster to drive Japanese trains. Enough said. You owe his site [...]
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