Help to identify a Lionel sound board and/or tender

To answer your questions CW, The board is 8204T-34. Your tender is from the 8204 C&O 4-4-2. ( some had leftover cabs from the 8142 C&O 4-4-2). The only other tender to use this board is the 8206 4-6-4. (Which we have had many discussions about this engine.) My guess there was only one run of these boards in 1972. Yellow to the roller.

Thanks Chuck! 

The board is a 2 note whistle and white noise generator from 1983.  Be careful, the wire you think is the chug cam may be the wire that uses armature noise to active the chug sound.  I may have a schematic somewhere.  

Lou N

The wire that I believe to be the chuff trigger has a small tongue connector, identical to what Lionel used on early SOS tenders. The whistle sound is not very realistic at all.

Brushing the tongue against ground does produce the chuffing sound.

Sorry Lou, but Chuck is right.  There were no C&O locos with gold markings catalogued in the '80s, and Sound of Steam with Whistle was only used from '72 thru '75.  I have firsthand experience with this board.  Unfortunately it's at my parents' house in Penna so I can't look to see where the wires go.  Not 100% sure but I believe the single pin connector near the middle of the board is the chuff contact switch.

Could one of the EE's on here infer which wire is which from looking at the components?

Two of the wires are attached to the board by a connector that slips over a single pin. Those are the speaker wires. Since the speaker is mounted to the shell, this allows the wires to be detached without desoldering so the shell can be separated from the chassis.

I unsoldered the wires at the speaker before I saw the pins.

Ted Sowirka posted:

Sorry Lou, but Chuck is right.  There were no C&O locos with gold markings catalogued in the '80s, and Sound of Steam with Whistle was only used from '72 thru '75.  I have firsthand experience with this board.  Unfortunately it's at my parents' house in Penna so I can't look to see where the wires go.  Not 100% sure but I believe the single pin connector near the middle of the board is the chuff contact switch.

Could one of the EE's on here infer which wire is which from looking at the components?

I'll take your word for it.  I do remember working on one of these around '83.  Maybe old stock.

Lou N

C W Burfle posted:

The wire that I believe to be the chuff trigger has a small tongue connector, identical to what Lionel used on early SOS tenders. The whistle sound is not very realistic at all.

Brushing the tongue against ground does produce the chuffing sound.

The whistle is a two note phase shift oscillator.  It had to be a sine wave source so as not to create lots of harmonics.  To tune it use a blower whistle.  Tape off one port and blow the whistle and turn one pot to try to match the frequency.  The do the same thing with the other pot and the other blower whistle port taped off.

If you have a frequency meter or scope I believe they were 534 and 746Hz.

Lou N

Or to make it easier, both trimpot tabs were factory set at 11:00 position.

Thank you to everybody for your replies.

I had the tender in my pile of stuff to go out the door, then I decided to find out about the sound board.
It so happens that I have an 8206 that has a tender with the wrong sound board in it. It's a 2046 style modern era tender, but it only has sound of steam.  I guess I'll be switching sound boards sometime in the future.

Funny that I was even considering the sale. Normally I keep odd tenders, just in case.

As to adjusting the pots: Maybe I will mark their current positions and play with them a bit to see if I can get the whistle to sound better.

Oh, forgot, the Milwaukee Road 4-4-2 also had this SOS and whistle board too.