Good Evening. Has anyone installed DCC into a Red Caboose GP9 and if so do you have any tips? What about speakers and smoke units?
Thanks,
Stephen
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I had a Tsunami DCC ddecoder installed in an RC GP9, when Jay Criswell built the drive and Proto:48 wheelsets. As to brand of speaker, not sure. Jay might see this and chime in. Here are a couple of images - the decoder is sitting beneath the speaker. Please note, the Tsunami's will not typically work with O scale motors because of the current draw - Jay used Faulhaber motors which draw only about 0.3A.
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The speaker and it's enclosure came from Litchfield Station. So did the wire termination blocks. The speaker is 8 ohm and is 28mm wide and 40 mm long.
Jay
If you have an original drive, it has a Pittman 85xx motor. My experience is that these motors draw about 2.5 amps under load. so you need a decoder that can handle that kind of amperage.
Without sound, I use NCE D408SR decoders with these motors. They work wonderfully and have about 8 functions for lights and other stuff. I had an old SoundTraxx soundbug that I used with one of these. It is a sound only decoder. I don't like smoke units, so I have none installed.
A word of cautions the Red Caboose GP9 is styrene and will melt if subjected to too much heat. I recommend using LED for the lights and of course be careful with the smoke unit. Any hot element touching the plastic may damage it.
If you are using the metal frame shown above it comes with holes on each end so you can mount posts that will hold a shelf to mount decoders etc. The shelf can be made of any material you like. The picture below shows you the idea, that one is made from styrene and has approx .95 inches of clearance between the top of the shelf and the inside of the loco shell.
