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.