How hard to disassemble and add DCC . I am dcc ignorant.
What steps have you taken so far to educate yourself about it?
you would need to hard wire the decoder and isolate the motor leads from the chassis. it is not a particularly difficult conversion, but it isn't plug n play either. I did mine a couple years back, and i'll have to see if I took photos of it.
A pictoral walk through woud help a lot. or else a verbal will work. thank you
db23-7 is not a split frame loco. it has the solid frame with the screw-on top piece and circuit board. the motor has two phosphor bronze or copper tabs which come out of the brush caps on the motor, these contacts must be removed and replaced by wires soldered to the caps (the orange and grey wires on the decoder harness) and insulated from the frame pieces. the wires from the trucks to the circuit board go to the red and black decoder wires. the circuit board that came with the locomotive will be scrapped, but you can cut the ends off where the headlights are and wire them to the lighting function leads of the decoder. this is a very basic description of what I had to d to convert this locomotive to dcc.
in order to get a pictorial of my conversion, I have to look through about 20k loosely organized photos and find them. they are sorted by date, so it is a matter of remembering when I did the conversion.
this brings up another subject altogether, documentation of projects like this. it would be nice if we could have a few threads showing how to do these conversions on various Bachmann locomotives, either on this site (dcc faq maybe) or possibly another site if Bachmann is not interested in adding it to faq. this way we would not have to reinvent the wheel so to speak when somebody wants to do a conversion.
http://www.trainboard.com/grapevine/showthread.php?124252-Decoder-for-Bachmann-B23-7-B30-7
jb that appears to be an n scale locomotive. the one I have has a completely different circuit board.
TCS has a lot of "how to" pictures on their site.
For HO http://www.tcsdcc.com/Customer_Content/Installation_Pictures/HO_Scale/HO_Search/search.html (http://www.tcsdcc.com/Customer_Content/Installation_Pictures/HO_Scale/HO_Search/search.html) scroll down to Bachmann for an assortment of Bachmann locos.
The B30-7 isn't specifically listed, but I suspect either the Baldwin RF-16 "Shark" or EMD F7 will be close enough to give you the general idea.
Being the TCS site, they show their decoders. But the decoder wire colors will be the same, and the steps will be the same, for anyones decoders.
Len
Quote from: jward on January 27, 2015, 12:27:20 AM
jb that appears to be an n scale locomotive
Hmmmm, guess it could be
Jeff. Didn't notice; it was the only link I found related to the above loco that had pics. I guess they are quite different in design?
Thanks guys I think i've got it