richard carr
Western Thunderer
This model has been out for a little while now and I always liked the 2 tone green ones so I put it on the Christmas list and the Boss duly delivered on Christmas day.
Personally I think is one of Heljans best models to date, it is a huge improvement over their 25/1. I certainly think that the model caputres the looks really well especially the curved front. The hand rails are little over emphasised but they are like that on the real thing.
It has now been converted to the S7 there are no real difficulties the wheels come out easily and ust need to be reprofiled and regauged on the axles.
Refitting the bogie cover plates took a little while as there seems to be just one position where they fit properly.
I then added a Loksound XL V4 decoder although you could easily remove one motor and add an HO intended decoder.
The internals are much better laid out than before the correct DCC colour wires are generally used, grey and orange for the motor red and black for the pickup wires etc.
The PCB is also properly labelled so you know which wire is which, about tie too.
You will also notice that it is using 2 horizontal motors that drive each bogie through a universal joint a big improvement over the vertical motors if you ask me.
Here the decoder has been installed with the speaker on top of the bogie gearbox.
In the previous photo you can see the original PCB fixed to a black plastic plate. Once you remove the PCB (it just unscrews) it looks like the decoder should go on the black plastic plate there are holes to match but unfortunately you can not get the body back on if you retain it so you need to remove that too and then add some insulation under the decoder I have uder a bit of thin plastic card. The speaker is stuck to the gear box with blu tack. The instructions say that you can put the speaker in the fuel tank, you could but it would need to be a very small speaker and ther are no holes for the sound to escape.
The coupling also proved troublesome, theywere not screwed together and would not do so I ended up filing the screw thinner and soldering it into the knuckle joint the screw threads did not match for reason.
Overall though I am very pleased with the model it runs very well indeed the fan works nicely without being too noisy and all the lights work as they should.
Personally I think is one of Heljans best models to date, it is a huge improvement over their 25/1. I certainly think that the model caputres the looks really well especially the curved front. The hand rails are little over emphasised but they are like that on the real thing.
It has now been converted to the S7 there are no real difficulties the wheels come out easily and ust need to be reprofiled and regauged on the axles.
Refitting the bogie cover plates took a little while as there seems to be just one position where they fit properly.
I then added a Loksound XL V4 decoder although you could easily remove one motor and add an HO intended decoder.
The internals are much better laid out than before the correct DCC colour wires are generally used, grey and orange for the motor red and black for the pickup wires etc.
The PCB is also properly labelled so you know which wire is which, about tie too.
You will also notice that it is using 2 horizontal motors that drive each bogie through a universal joint a big improvement over the vertical motors if you ask me.
Here the decoder has been installed with the speaker on top of the bogie gearbox.
In the previous photo you can see the original PCB fixed to a black plastic plate. Once you remove the PCB (it just unscrews) it looks like the decoder should go on the black plastic plate there are holes to match but unfortunately you can not get the body back on if you retain it so you need to remove that too and then add some insulation under the decoder I have uder a bit of thin plastic card. The speaker is stuck to the gear box with blu tack. The instructions say that you can put the speaker in the fuel tank, you could but it would need to be a very small speaker and ther are no holes for the sound to escape.
The coupling also proved troublesome, theywere not screwed together and would not do so I ended up filing the screw thinner and soldering it into the knuckle joint the screw threads did not match for reason.
Overall though I am very pleased with the model it runs very well indeed the fan works nicely without being too noisy and all the lights work as they should.
