At Christmas Mrs Bufferstop gave me DC Concepts rolling road kit.
It can be used on any piece of track, even on a spare piece using crock clips. However I felt to do it justice I needed to do a proper job of it. So that was 2023's first project. Amazingly I remembered to take some pictures along the way. I knocked up a case from 4mm MDF and attached a pair of solid wooden ends (Cut from a discarded IKEA cheeseboard) then I tried various bits inside it.
The two PCBs are a switch mode power supply and a motor speed controller.
Here's the meters fitted through the front.
The 5A meter would do, but I stuck a 10A one in the hole for the volt meter just to see how it went.
It went together OK so I ordered a 20V meter and some switches. Whilst waiting for them I did a few experiments and decided to ditch the switch mode supply in favour of an input socket so I could power it by the most suitable supply for the motor. We have wall warts and power bricks coming out of the woodwork and leaving the power outside of the box kept any mains voltages out of reach.
Here's what the assembled thing looks like.
That's a Tenshodo SPUD motor bogie on the rollers. The switches I've added are, on the left a power on off, I've left space underneath for an LED lndicator lamp when I can find one. On the right there's a centre off reversing switch above the speed control knob. Testing it out few of my locos draw enogh current to show up well on the meter so I'm thinking of replacing it with a one amp one and putting a switchable shunt across it to allow up to 2A, which should be enough for any 00 loco I'm likely to try. (Must mug up the method of determining the resistance of the shunt, it is 62yrs since I last did it! One thing I'm waiting for is a resetable circuit breaker to handle any short circuit of the track. it will go on the back panel in the -ve wire running from the input socket to the speed controller. Now all I need to do is put away all the tools that I've used during it's construction, didn't know I had so many.
