2022_07_10 Bloody Hell!!! Where did four months go to?

 2022_07_10  Sorry about the (lack of) posts. 

And thank you to all who have inquired about me. No I still have not got covid, and am still not vaccinated. I don't sit around home, and am out and about as normal. Health is pretty good, although nearing my 77th birthday, I am exhausting myself more than I remember before.  

                                                                                                                                                                THE LAYOUT  

    Its not because we have not been working on the Railway.

Its more like working hundreds of hours and yet nothing much accomplished :(

Wiring has always been my problem and that includes soldering. And that's why we used spade connectors to make our joins. And no that has never been a problem, not once!

However the spades have made trouble shooting much easier. With over 500+ spades being purchased, and all failures caught at installation. Either failed to grab wire, or  difficult to push into main buss thus breaking spade off.

Trouble shooting? If you have a short in an isolated section, just remove connector and follow through till fault goes away. Fix and move along. Imagine using solder instead of spades. Ok Ok I know some of you "experts" out there don't make mistakes and never ever have to redo connections. Sadly that's not me, it would seem.

Trouble shooting is done using Poses track detectors, and multi meters. Yesterday a friend (Graeme who we will show building backdrops later) Built a battery operated buzzer to detect shorts. This caused us a lot of problems.

As an example . If I test between rails with the meter set to ohms and buzzer, I get no responses in some places. When we ran the buzzer over same connection, we get a short indication. So far I have found that you must remove all trains and illuminated carriages from track. And as my Tam Valley devices also run off the DCC buss, I am wondering if we are still on the same fools errand. Getting under the layout to disconnect every TAM device would be a real problem, 6 months into the chase to find out why the Albury section of the layout is no longer working. The c/b is tripped allowing the rest of the layout to run perfectly.... 

Tonight I will make a video of the fault and we can try to work this out together. I am sure it will be solved by one of you :D

The last backdrops (hiding the brick walls are in. Thank you Graeme, who designed and installed them.

 

BACKDROPS

Pictures tell the story again. 

Who put the bricks in front of the backdrop built to hide the bricks??

All we need to do is blue them up a bit :D

Cheers

from all of us :D