Lionel Amfleet Cab Car with Blunami 2200

Great idea! Well executed.

Good work with the lights and sound, so far. Please show us a video of the completed car when it’s up and running.

You will want to add a screen over the speaker hole (just a small square of nylon window screen is fine). The speaker magnet is powerful and it will pick up any magnetic debris on the track as it runs over it.  

Interesting application of the Blunami, I was wondering when I saw the topic if there was a motor in the mix!   Cool to have all the sound and light features.

@Boilermaker1 posted:

You will want to add a screen over the speaker hole (just a small square of nylon window screen is fine). The speaker magnet is powerful and it will pick up any magnetic debris on the track as it runs over it.  

I think it might be okay that way, since the plastic pilot covers up the speaker hole most of the time and the speaker is around an inch off the track.

Small update, added 4 holes to the pilot to allow more sound through when the car is on completely straight track. I'd drill more holes or make the holes bigger, but I am worried about that area becoming extremely weak as a result. The pilot is just made out of plastic and I still want to couple something to the front of the car on occasion.

I also decided to add a screen over the speaker hole, just so it's there. Also adds some protection while I am putting the 2 screws into the frame.

Used some chicken wire, as I wasn't able to find any window screen material. Should be better than the window screen material anyway.

Also for reference, this is what the wiring looks like in the cab part of the car.

There's 2 LED headlights wired in parallel, 2 red LED marker lights wired in parallel, and 2 Ditch light LEDs with separate grounds. The black wire is actually the common power wire. I did this many years ago when I fixed the wiring for the PCB, because I didn't have access to blue wire at the time. Each colored wire represents each of the 4 lighting functions. Yellow for marker lights, blue for headlights, and green for the ditch lights.

You might be able to see that the original PCB with the lights is omitted here. I decided to put LEDs in place of the old lenses to have brighter light and have less light bleed. The marker light LEDs have heat shrink around them to make sure the light doesn't shine in the yellow plastic of the front. The lenses on that plastic headlight piece were cut off and replaced with 3mm LEDs and that plastic headlight guide was painted black to look more like the real thing.

Here's the final pictures of the install. Buck converter and rectifier are both from Amazon.

And also a quick video of it in action, I will have a full video up showcasing everything

The car sounds are quieter than I expected at the museum, but it's not terrible. It's pretty clearly audible at around 5 feet away. I did change the horn sound to K5LA (1), as it's closer to the sound of the real Metroliner cab cars.

Really great job, and a creative use of Blunami.

Does the Genesis also have Blunami? It would be interesting to see what could be done with having Blunami equipped engines consisted with cab cars or other equipped rolling stock.

~Chris

@C.Vigs posted:

Really great job, and a creative use of Blunami.

Does the Genesis also have Blunami? It would be interesting to see what could be done with having Blunami equipped engines consisted with cab cars or other equipped rolling stock.

~Chris

No that has PS3. A club member is planning to convert his K-Line Surfliner cab car to have a Blunami too, along with his dead F59PHI

Seeing as I found the sounds of the cab car to be too quiet with the usual background noise of the museum, I will be working on building an audio amplifier/booster for the speaker. The volume is already maxed out on the decoder (horn and master volume), so I am looking for around a 1-1.5 watt boost in power to the speaker (the peak power is 4 watts for the speaker). The decoder has a max power output of 2 watts for the speaker. Anyone have any suggestions for an amplifier circuit for this application?

So quick update. On Friday I decided to redo the speaker mounting method to have it screwed onto the metal frame. Before I had it held down on with double stick tape on the top of the magnet onto the underside of the interior part. It seems to have improved the sound and made it louder than before.

I don't have a picture of its new setup right now, but here is a quick video showing it in action at my local club. So you can hear what it sounds like with the new speaker mouting method

Here's a final picture of the final configuration of the Blunami install in the car. I was adding figures to the interior so this was a perfect time to show this.

I added 8 capacitors in parallel to act as a keep alive (on the DC output connection of the buck converter). That gives me around 1 to 2 seconds of run time if I cut the power, but will ensure it will not instantly loose power if it goes over back to back switches.

This is very impressive work, love the ditchlights! Looking forward to seeing the surfliner car install, I'm all eyes and ears with notepad ready.

@@T1Titan_ZachF posted:

This is very impressive work, love the ditchlights! Looking forward to seeing the surfliner car install, I'm all eyes and ears with notepad ready.

I'm not doing the Surfliner car, my friend from my local club is doing that