Started something different this evening, excuse the bed sheet 'workbench' but I decided to disassemble an mpv to see about converting it into the single car network rail s+c recording unit
The unit in pieces, one part is powered and the other is a dummy unit with just lights fed from the motorised unit
The inner and outer ends have different pick up and lighting arrangements so I needed to adapt them slightly but nothing too major
Basically remove the powered coupling leaving the wires attached to the look for now
The 4 black wires from the loom will attach to the wires from the dummy car cab lighting (that cab of course will be at the opposite end of the powered chassis!)
Reattached the bogie and tackled the next issue.....
The massive decoder housing and what to do with it!
On the real thing the floor is practically flat so the decoder sitting up as designed would look very wrong if I had to build a cabinet for it to go in, I removed the bracket from the chassis and basically folded the pcb out of the way, also removed the underfloor motor housing moulding which revealed a load of room for me to basically bin the whole pcb and hardware an 8 pin wired decoder in place instead, luckily all the lighting wires feed down that way too
There will still be a slight step up where the motor sits proud of the floor but once I build the frame over the centre part it shouldn't be too noticeable, I'll carefully cut out the motor shape from the existing removable module floor and build it up with a plasticard frame
Reuse some of the genny modules and make up some more and it will start to come together nicely
Really should get some of my other projects finished first though!!