# DCC ready to DCC sound with LEDs:Athearn SW1000 switcher tutorial



## SRV1

Well, I'm finally done! Not sure how much time I actually have in this project, but I know I've listened to many hour long podcasts and music playlists while working on this. May be my first post actually contributing to the forum.

I'm definitely not ready to say the student has become the teacher here (lol), but I have a little experience under my belt that I will share. May help somebody down the road. First word of advice is if you want a small HO switcher with sound and light upgrades, make sure you REALLY desperately want it, because you're going to be working on it for a while. Space is severely limited and not all went as well as it could have for me. 

You will need a dremel with cutoff wheel and several types of bits for removal, some small screw drivers, hobby knife, small soldering iron, small pliers, aquariums sealer, super glue gel, 30 gauge wire, a small speaker & enclosure, and a sound board of your choice. 

For this application, I bought a Tsunami TSU-1000 board to replace the factory one. The particular motor for this locomotive is an EMD-645 non-turbo. Be sure to find the right board for your model. For anyone just looking into DCC, the factory DCC "ready" board is not a sound board. It will take a chip so it can run with a DCC controller and run the lights but it can't be set up for sound. 

Well, here we go.....


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## SRV1

A set of screw drivers like these is a must for the small screws and just for poking and proding in tight locations. 











So first things first, you may as well take the couplers off, remove the hand rails off the cab, carefully pop the cab off (there's a tab in the front and two tabs in the back. (They're flexible but can break. ) Remove the 2 screws for the interior. Then remove the shell. Don't worry about wires. They're all coming off anyway. Except you can leave the wires soldered to the motor.

Remove the circuit board. Remove the wires to the truck towers from the board, pop the worm gear covers off, pull the gear out,squeeze the sides of the towers together and drop each truck out. Remove the fuel tank so you can get to the screws to take the motor out. (At first I thought all this would be unnecessary, but you have to do some cutting and you don't want metal shavings getting into the motor or any gears.)

Here's what it looks like for starters, with the board off:













Here's what the Tsunami TSU-1000 sound board looks like next to Athearn's standard DCC ready board. I included the speaker and enclosure for size comparison:


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## SRV1

You can leave the regular bulbs that come with it in there. But while I had it torn apart, gc53 convinced me to change them out with LEDs. It added some extra work but worth it in the end. Here is a size comparison of a yeloglo tower LED next to an original bulb I removed:










The holes for the lights are a hair under 2 mm. Quite small. I used a 5/64 drill bit which measured 2mm to drill the holes just a tiny bit bigger. Here is the cab. Left hole is drilled out to fit the 2mm LED:











Now, just drilling the holes bigger is not enough to get this type of LED to work in this particular configuration. The square portion on the back of them is far to large to let them fit tight against the ceiling and slide in. So I did a combination of removing plastic on the LEDs themselves to where one side was about flat with the cylinder portion. Also buzzed off some on the sides so they would fit side by side. 
Then I also had to remove material from the cab and the inside of the hood as well, because the holes are right up against the top portion. This provides a pocket for the back portion of these LEDs to sit in. I used the dremel with a very fine grinding bit for this:











I tested this out and it worked. But what you'll find is now the plastic that remains is much thinner. So when the LEDs are on, they cause the whole roof to glow. Now you have to black out the removal areas with some paint. I also painted the back of the LEDs:










Here are the LEDs mounted in the cab. Even with the holes drilled out, they are an extremely tight fit and it takes quite a bit of force to shove them all the way in. I did break one trying to get it out to re-solder a wire. (Luckily I ordered 10 of them because I knew that would happen.)










(I did replace the windshield wiper in the end.) 

Well, I'm gonna have to stop here for the night. I'll finish this thread tomorrow and end with a video of it in action on my programming track.


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## gunrunnerjohn

It always turns out to be more work than you figured when you started, right?


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## gc53dfgc

I went ahead and added your install into the DCC installs thread and when I get either a finished picture of it or a good picture of the work done to it I will add that photo to the thread so they get an idea of the engine and install.


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## SRV1

Great. Thanks gc. I hope somebody can use it some day. 

Yeah, John, that's the way it always goes for me too. Car stereo installs, maintenance & home improvement projects come to mind! 

Alright, on with the thread....


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## SRV1

Here's another shot of the LEDs and what I did with them. The bottom one is how they come. The top two are the ones I modified by cutting down the length of the leads and bending them away from each other. This works well for the cab. The front ones get smashed in anyway so it isn't too critical. Just be sure to tape them off in case they touch.










Here's what a pair of them looked like wired up. Just a positive from one lead to the other positive and a negative from one lead to the other negative. Run a resistor off one side. (Tsunami recommended a 1k but I ended up going with a 4.7k because they were so bright.) Then run a wire off the lead and resistor to the board as shown in the directions. Make sure the connections are strong before inserting them in. They go in hard and it's difficult just to get them lined up to begin with.


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## gunrunnerjohn

I recommend you invest in some assorted sizes of heat shrink tubing, it'll really make projects like this go smoother.


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## SRV1

Ok, enough on LEDs. Now lets get back to the modifying. Tsunamis directions tell you to take 0.115 off the front tower portion (sticks up right behind the front grill). And to also modify the portion right above the one end of the motor. This is to make room for a bracket to hold a speaker. They have you custom make an enclosure, which I should have done. But I went with a standard speaker and enclosure that I purchased. 











Here are the areas on the front of the frame that were cut out (silver metal). This wasn't too high tech. If you cut too deep back where the motor sits, you just have to build it back up with something to get above the motor. I cut small pieces of plexiglass and ran them across for the speaker to sit on. 












Here is a front view of the worm gear covers. (The rounded covers that sit on top of the trucks over their gears.) You need to slightly modify the front one as shown. On the left one, you can see I buzzed off some of the plastic with the dremel. Quite a bit can come off without hurting it. This just makes it flat so it doesn't rub on the bottom of your speaker enclosure. You also need to ground down the two towers on the front truck, where the pickup wires go to. I ground them down just to the top of the hole where the wires go in. Left about a 1/4 of a mm above the hole. The plastic clips will still fit down on them. They'll just be shorter.











Inside the shell, in the front, there are 3 pegs that stick down. Two small and a large one. They do nothing but get in the way. So I ground them down flat.


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## SRV1

I only have a few pics left, but at this point, the hard part is done. All you need to do is start putting everything back together. The new board *does not* have holes for the two screws that came out of the factory board. And I didn't see any room to drill them in. The only option you have is to glue the board down to something which I did NOT do. I opted to let the board free float. Some may frown on this but there are so many wires attached and it fits so tight inside the shell anyway, that it really can't go anywhere. The speaker is held down with aquarium sealant so I can pull it out again if necessary.

Here's the board with wires attached and speaker in place. The capacitor you see hanging of the board, has to go into the cabs interior, shown sitting next to it. Just drill the opening slightly larger and it's a nice, snug fit. (And pretty much the only room available for it.)












Here it is with the LEDs attached for a test run. Though I explained them first, I actually did the LEDs last. Once you confirm they're lighting as they're supposed to, with the intensity you want, you can go ahead and push them into the shell. Make the wires long enough so you can lay the shell down and without making it too tight.











This is the last photo I took of the process. Here you can see the capacitor installed into the interior and it is screwed down. The LEDs are installed into the cab, and it's waiting to be pushed back into place.


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## SRV1

*Final notes on this install:*

There are many delicate, fragile hand railings on the shell. If I had to do it again, I would have taken them all off to begin with instead of just a couple. 

Despite the mods in the front, I still had room issues when putting the shell back on. The speaker and enclosure I got were a poor choice. It sounds great. Width wise it fit great. But it's just too thick and too long. I would highly recommend using a round speaker that is narrow enough to fit in this shell. The board has to go far enough forward to not be in the way of the cab. I had to put it partially over the speaker so the cab would fit back down. This is not ideal and did not allow the front to come fully down like it should. But its real close. It was enough to get the coupler back in, barely. 

There may be better LEDS for this project than I used. They make smaller ones. These tower type ones work well because it's a long ways from the interior to the exterior for the lights on this model. The full length of the front portion of them was needed, at a minimum.

I found an actual pic of the prototype online and noticed a few modifications that can be made. It's gray around the front lights so I painted that in and painted the antenna gray above the cab. I'd like to find a yellow strobe light to mount on top of the cab in the future as well. Once I get an airbrush again, I will probably white wash the trucks and the fuel tank to fade them out a bit. 

This model is highly detailed out of the box. I would say it is a great value.


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## SRV1

*Video*

Lastly, here is a video of it in action. It shows a complete start up to shut down. It is programmed to the road number and I'm using an NCE power cab.

The video was shot with an HD flip cam. I found that if it plays choppy, it's probably your computer. The video is choppy on this desktop computer but plays smoothly on my other two laptops Why, I don't know. I hope it plays smoothly for everyone.

This was shot on my programming track above my computer. It's a painfully short run, but all I have wired up to actually run a train at this time. I will probably leave this as my programming track. I have a 2nd NCE power port that will be installed where I want to do my shelf layout in the basement.


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## mopac

Nice switcher. Thanks for the info and the video.


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## gc53dfgc

Do you mind SRV1 if I download the video and then take a few stills from it to put as pictures on the installs thread?


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## SRV1

gc53dfgc said:


> Do you mind SRV1 if I download the video and then take a few stills from it to put as pictures on the installs thread?



Yeah, no problem. Go ahead. Thanks.


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## gunrunnerjohn

Looks good, and the lights seem plenty bright.


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## SRV1

gunrunnerjohn said:


> Looks good, and the lights seem plenty bright.


 Thanks. Yeah, I think they're a good brightness level. You should have seen them with only the 1k resistors. You wouldn't have been able to see the ends of it straight on in the video.


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## gunrunnerjohn

I know that I had to tone the lights down some in my locomotives, I started with 20ma to the LED's, WAY too much!


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