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Reply to "Bluerail and Deadrail Mod to MTH 7Premier R-2 Engineering Sample. UPDATE 10/01/21 IT'S ALIVE!"

So as part of building the wiring harnesses for the Bluerail / Tsunami hookup, I had to verify that the motor leads were isolated from frame ground or I would risk frying the board.  Everything looked OK there, but by chance I just happened to check continuity between the pickup and ground since I've seen pinched wires end up wreaking havoc.

Sure enough, I get this when I clip onto either pickup and touch frame ground:

If you can't tell, that says 0.8 ohms.  Not good, so something is touching something.  I disassembled both pickup roller assemblies, pickup rollers, removed the motor and the mount frame, tore out the pickup wires, but could not find the ghost.  Until I got to the rear connection to the pickup roller screw.  Took me about 15 minutes to find but then I saw this:



Do you see it? 

Neither did I the first time.  But just behind the loop is a tiny little bit of heatshrink worn off that was allowing the crimped connector to touch the corner of the chassis.  And I do mean TINY.  Almost microscopic.

After re-doing the eye crimp and new heat shrink, I have vanquished the ghost.

Now my chassis harness looks like this, and all wires are checked and in their correct pin locations!

Got the Track / Battery switch installed, and both sides of the harness ready.  The forward side will connect to a boiler harness where all the connections to the Tsunami will go.  The rear side will connect to the tender harness where the Bluerail card and speaker / lights go.

I asked a question in another thread...need to figure out how to fire the rear protocoupler.  It's a PS2 coupler.  Also need to figure out how to switch on the PS1 (yes, PS1, not PS2) smoke unit.  Unless anyone knows of a good off-the-shelf smoke driver that can take advantage of the existing encoder.

Up next, speaker.

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