Sound for an Athearn SW1500

[cnw1961]

A few days ago I got my new Athearn RTR SW1500. It is a very nice little engine with an incredible level of detail, almost as good as an Athearn Genesis.



Especially the grill on top of the radiator is absolutely amazing.



Being the first Athearn RTR with a can motor, it even runs smoothly and quietly ... well, too quietly for my liking. So I decided to put a LokSound decoder in this little beauty. I thought it would be quite difficult, but it proved to be very easy instead. The engine is DCC ready with a 9-pin and and an 8-pin plug on board. I don’t use 9-pin decoders, so I cut off the 9-pin plug to give way for the LokSound decoder.



I wanted to put a small .640" x 1" mm speaker above the front truck, but found out that it was just .040" too long to fit in between the front of the frame and the pc board. After some contemplation (I am not that quick ... ) I had the idea to remove the little black clips that are used to attach the wires to the board. I soldered the wires to the board instead and now the speaker would fit in perfectly.



At the front I placed the speaker on the frame (after cutting off .040" of the frame to make the speaker fit under the shell), for the rear end of the speaker I made a little support from .060" styrene.



I fixed it by tucking it between the pc board and the frame. Now I only had to glue the speaker with a tiny drop of super glue to the frame.



Well, that really did not hurt, did it?