Friday, 27 November 2020

RF16 Shark sound install

 Ah the burble of a Baldwin

I have been planning the install of a sound decoder into the ER Models RF16 Shark for some time. I have been following a number of threads on "The RailWire" for a while and found some suggestions as to speaker enclosures and small mobile phone speakers that work well on the Loksound Micro v5.

Once all the parts arrived and with a little down time I set about the install of the speaker and sound decoder into the RF16.

As the ER Models RF16 has a reasonably solid frame, there was a little bit of milling to be done in order for fit the parts near the rear of the loco.

As the loco comes with rapido couplers and I always run the loco with its sister RF16, I cut the front coupler box from the bogie and installed a body mount medium shank microtrains coupler. At the back of the loco, I replaced the rapido coupler with a medium shank unimate on one of the pair and a short shank unimate on the other loco to get a reasonable gap between them.

Here are a few progress pictures and a short video.






The audio from the phone is not as good as the loco sounds on the layout but gives you an idea. 
The burble of the Baldwin sounds great!...