I have a PSC N&W 4-8-0 M2C. I finally got the decoder for it that I ordered a few weeks ago and I want to install it. However I do not know if the headlight is an LED or a lightbulb. I have taken the engine apart but I can not get the circuit board that is in the front of the engine out without causing some damage. I know the circuit board controls the directional lighting to the front light and the marker lights. Is there any way to determine if these are LEDs or what type of bulb. Or does anyone know what this engine came with.
Hey Kevin, assuming it’s just an LED or bulb and no other circuitry, an LED has a circuit one way but not the other, do you have a multimeter with a diode test function, a bulb will give a reading either way a LED won’t.
Ken.
I do, but I don’t know what else is on the circuit board because I have not been able to get it out. On DC it has directional lighting, so I know there is some sort of diode that limits current to one way for each light, I just don’t know what type of light is there so I am not sure if I need to add a resisitor or not to the line to the bulb. I don’t want to blow the bulb or fry the decoder trying.
Allright, I finally got the circuit board out of the front of the locomotive. The lights are bulbs (i guess grain of rice) as they are much smaller than what I have seen previously. The marker lights appear ro be grounded to the frame as there is only one wire to them. The headlamp has two wires to it from the circuit board. I installed a DZ143 decoder into it, and everything worked but the lights. When it was on the program track, the lights came on, but they did not work once I moved it to the main. Everything else works on the main however. Does this make sense to anyone?
Makes a lot of sense if that was a low voltage bulb - you might have blown it with full voltage. Try it again on the program track to see of the bulb is still good. If it still works, then try the function buons to turn it on. Be carefull, most decoder light output is full voltage and you need dropping resistors in series with the bulb.
Jim Bernier
Have you tried contacting the manufacturer and asking them?
Hey, as long as it’s out, you can get a LED for a buck and a half at your LHS, and a current-limiting resistor at 5/$1 at Radio Shack. Then you’ll know what you’ve got, it will probably never burn out on you, and it will draw less power and be cooler (temperature-wise) than the original.
[#ditto] I love LED’s they make great headlights.
Ken.
Yeah, they certainly do. One nice thing about them is that they throw a tight beam, not a spherical halo of light. That’s what headlights are supposed to do. The fact that they run so cool allows you to mount them right in the plastic shell, which you could never do with an incandescent without fear of melting something.