Track cleaner DCC upgrade

[adamski]

Good afteroon

I have a old LGB track cleaning loco but the interal PCB board that the decoder 55021 plugs into has failed. I have removed the board and wired the decoder directly but I need to add a relay and diodes to run the motor that cleans the wheels. My thoughts are relay controlled of function 1 but where do I solder the control side of relay to? Take track power to relay through relay and then through a bridge rectifier then to the motor. Any ideas on bridge size and wiring this would be very helpful

Many thanks
Adam

 

[curtis]

The concern I'd have with running track power directly to the motor is the lack of control you'll have over the speed. It'll always run at ~20V. Are you using the diodes as a sort of bridge rectifier to 'convert' the track DCC into DC?

Which decoder are you using? If your decoder gives you enough config flexibility, one thing you could do is configure the function output to only be on in the forward direction.

My instinct on this would be to use a decoder designed for the job. Mxion do a special decoded designed for the Track Cleaning Loco (Drive SR (Special Decoder for Track Cleaning Loco))

 

[adamski]

The concern I'd have with running track power directly to the motor is the lack of control you'll have over the speed. It'll always run at ~20V. Are you using the diodes as a sort of bridge rectifier to 'convert' the track DCC into DC?

Which decoder are you using? If your decoder gives you enough config flexibility, one thing you could do is configure the function output to only be on in the forward direction.

My instinct on this would be to use a decoder designed for the job. Mxion do a special decoded designed for the Track Cleaning Loco (Drive SR (Special Decoder for Track Cleaning Loco))

Thank you for your reply, the existing pcb sent 18 to 20v to the cleaing motor, the plan was to use diodes to covert the DCC to dc for the motor.

I have run the cleaning wheels using a seperate decoder, so one for the driving wheels and one for the cleaning wheels so I could control both seperatly as I thought running the cleaning wheels slower might give a better finish but it did not sadly and having 2 decoder in the loco and swapping between address to control each motor was a pain.

Thank you for the link, I was just trying to find a way to save cost as I have a decoder 55021 which was what ran the loco before the main PCB died. So just need it to switch a relay and alter DCC to DC as that what the old pcb did before it failed

Many thanks

Adam