Moving on…

I have now attached the ducting to the extractor.  I gave up trying to attach the face plate by the bolts and used duct tape instead.  It works fine and will hopefully rid my office of a good proportion of the fumes caused by spraying/airbrushing.

I also converted a farish 08 chassis to dcc (using a ztc 255 decoder).  However this caused much in the way of headaches until I fiddled with the pickups and set the PWM on CV 9 to 120.  It now works ok at low speed (with the pwm at default the loco would hardly move) and now needs running in and weight (a white metal loco body plus some lead should do it) to really perform.  Thus the farish warship chassis (also pictured and far easier to DCCify as it has a 6 pin socket) was used for layout testing. 

After some judicious bending of point blades and the swapping over of one frog feed (I had connected it the wrong way around), I am pleased to report that the yard board works well.  However one of the hoffs is not switching the polarity of the frog correctly and so this will need to be replaced.  I may replace it with a tortoise! My multimeter set on AC reports 21v in all areas and 0v between the frog and the next iso joiner where the point is set against the direction, which is correct.  However at the problem frog both sides get about 8v!  It is believed to be a problem with the polarity change switch getting stuck and not throwing over correctly.  It works fine in the other direction.

My brother and I were also able to sort a problem with one of my cabs which seems to have become reset somehow and wasn’t responding. The system menu needed changing to alter the total number of operational cabs to 3 and the cab I had to number 2 (it was set as 99 and thus didn’t work).  A slightly bizarre thing to have to do, but it now works again so all is good.

I also laid a second track on test track so that I can easily swap between live testing and the program track.  This has already been useful in sorting out the problem with the 08.

The rest of the weekend was spent putting up gates on the drive, planing and installing a new door for my study, installing a kitchen extractor and fan cabinet and with my brother erecting my old sky minidish to receive freesat and thus get the world cup and wimbledon in HD (if I manage to fit in viewing time around the layout!).