It had been nearly a year since we added to our equipment roster, until our recent addition of a Mikado, described in our first installment. This time around, it’s an Aristocraft Pacific. It’s as good a deal as could be found. Not as good as the Mikado, but close. It’s a little more expensive and a little less impressive, but only because it’s the early version with plastic side rods and such.
It does have the original sound system in the tender, and it still works. It’s missing the whistle and the bell, but the bell harp is still there. It does have the “cow catcher”, unlike the Mikado. The one big feature it sports is it’s in the B&O Royal Blue livery. And like its ten wheeler predecessor, it’s a bit on the wobbly and unreliable side. But there’s hope for it. It should be fine after a much needed tune up.
Being the early version, it still has the “glowing firebox” feature, no longer present on the more recent Mikado. Best I can tell, the Pacific is pre 2003 and the Mikado 2003 or later. The difference is the Mikado has an added Battery vs. Track Power switch stacked with the Motor On/Off switch in place of the glowing firebox door in the Pacific.
The Pacific has Motor On/Off on the cab floor, along with the Lighting On/Off switch, also on the floor of the Mikado. The Pacific placed the Smoke On/Off switch at the front of the engine on the pilot frame. The Mikado has its Smoke On/Off switch on the cab floor, opposite the Lighting switch.
Initial Findings
I did manage to find the manual and more information on various large scale sites. It appears to match the “Old Pacific” manual. And now my searches are turning up the ART-5400 PWM controller for use with it. Still haven’t found the “magic words” for the search to find the waveforms. But then again, that was probably a closely guarded bit of secret information (read intellectual property) when they were still in business.
I won’t go into all the details of our foray into PWM motor controllers here. It’s pretty much covered elsewhere. The long and short of PWM, for me anyway, is the annoying buzz at anything in the audible frequency range, and the lack of response from any built in constant lighting circuitry at any frequency greater than a few kilohertz.
Considering this locomotive also sports its own track powered sound system, not sure how Aristocraft managed to get the PWM concept to work, let alone together with it. It does require a fair amount of voltage before anything works. IIRC, the wheels didn’t even start turning until around 8V.
We Have Sound
It took some doing to figure out how this sound board works. When I first opened the hatch on the tender looking for a battery, not only did I not find one, I didn’t even see the 9V battery clip laying inside there on the very bottom. It became very apparent when I removed the tender shell to get a look at what was going on inside.
At first glance I can tell this is old technology, likely from the ’90s judging by all the discrete components surrounding four Dual Inline Package (DIP) style integrated circuits. One’s a quad comparator op amp, one’s a decade (÷10) counter, another’s a hex inverter/buffer, and finally a dual channel audio amplifier. I finally got rid of most of my DIP style parts recently, deciding I’d never be using parts that were at least 30 years old in any design.
Of course the first thing I have to do is look up which post is which on a 9V battery so I can attach the bench supply with the correct polarity. Let’s try not to let out the magic smoke, shall we? So with that knowledge in hand, I power on the bench supply and… Nothing. Adjusting the voltage has no effect. Neither does adjusting the current limit. What about spinning the wheel with the sensor on it? Nothing.
Or Do We?
All this is going on while trying to record a video of it, and paying more attention to that, the lead that fell off the bench supply goes unnoticed at first. Not sure what the first clue was, no current draw perhaps? With the power now connected, the faint sound from the speaker of amplified noise together with one of those old style analog bell resonator circuits, right on the edge of ringing, riding on top of the noise can be heard.
Adjusting the volume knob has the expected “crackle”, another remnant from analog days where any DC voltage present on the adjuster arm detects every speck of dust in its path and creates a loud “pop” in the speaker when it finds it. But the real payoff comes from spinning the wheel with the sensor on it. The bell comes to life, then the chuff, chuff as the wheel spins faster.
It does manage to make reasonable bell, chuff, and hiss sounds, but will be replaced once the I2S sound sketch is up and running. The short exposure to that Phoenix 2K2 card spoiled me. It’s less than half the size of this thing, makes much better sound, and can be controlled simply by connecting external reed switches or programmatically via DCC or other means. And even that one’s obsolete!
Does It Run?
Jumped the gun describing the sound system first though. Once the tender’s open, it’s obvious more research is required. Testing out the engine came first. I set it on a short stretch of track and connected the test leads from the bench supply. It does run, if only for a short time before it runs off the end of the track. Reversing the polarity sends it the other direction.
So it does run, but how well is unknown until the first set of run in stands is finished printing and assembled. It takes six for just the three driver axles. Those together with the other ones I already had printed and assembled should be just enough… If the mix matched colors isn’t an issue. That set took all but the last one of the roller skate bearings. Time to restock those and the other hardware.
It probably wouldn’t have taken as long if the assembly steps hadn’t been recorded as well, but at least they’re finished. Once on the run in stand, it’s obvious this has a lot of slop designed in, most likely for tight radius curves. There’s at least a quarter of an inch (~6mm) slop side to side in each of the driver axles. Couple that with the middle axle being driven only by the plastic side rods and it’s a wobbly ride!
Death Wobble?
Don’t know if it’s “death wobble”, but she’s certainly a rockin’ back and forth and side to side! With a slight tug on the cab the wobble is tamed somewhat, but not entirely. While the first and last axles are physically linked together by a shaft to the motor, that middle axle is free to “float” between the side rod links. There are two of them, not one solid single side rod like on the ten wheelers.
One link is connected between the drive pins of the middle and rear drivers. The other connects to the that link and the drive pin of the front driver. The connecting rod from the piston and cylinder shares the middle driver’s pin with one of the side links as well as the arm to the valve rod. The sector arm rocks back and forth around a centered “Johnson bar” with the valve rod action.
That’s the extent of valving action. I’d like to draft up a CNC design to mill out metal side rods and operational valve links with prototypical reverser action. Unfortunately, the Mikado suffers the same valve action limitations with rigid cast plastic in place of the expected moving mechanism. Just now thinking about, it may be possible to borrow valve parts from the ten wheeler replacement mechanisms. Hmmm…
Saving The Best For Last?
More like saving the boring for last. The first installment of this series focused on catching up with where we’re at and why expanding the roster wasn’t a priority. Then it moved on to how most of these historic items are no longer available except for those rare offerings on eBay. The occasional item may pop up in an online dealer’s list of previously owned items, but they’re usually way overpriced.
With that being said, the particulars of the deal were held until the last this time around. This particular acquisition was one of those buy it now or best offer deals on eBay. Most of those available were in the $750 – $1150 “Buy It Now” price range. Not sure what the original price was back when Aristocraft was still in business, but even so, that’s pretty steep.
The offer was half the ask, and the seller countered with an extra $50 tacked on. Combined with tax and shipping it was a little over $500 all told, not quite a hundred dollars more than the Mikado deal, where the tax and shipping together were still less than just the shipping here.
Stupid eBay Tricks
Guess it’s a common “trick” eBay sellers use to avoid having to pay more of a surcharge or lose as much when some buyer tries to rook them, but when I see shipping costs of more than a hundred dollars, it better be hand delivered, straight to my hands, and not tossed around by the postal system until it’s dropped at my doorstep. Literally.
One thing I didn’t cover in the first part was all the offers I got from sellers I hadn’t extended and offer to… Way to scare me off. Folks I’ve never met nor reached out to, already “leaching” out to me. I already think what they’re asking is overpriced to begin with. Those offers only put the price in the ball park of other sellers, before I make any offers. No thanks. I’ll keep looking.
I know what these items are worth to me, regardless of what the sellers think they’re worth. “No lowball offers. I know what I got.” comes to mind. But enough about eBay sellers and tactics. I bought the item I wanted for a price I was willing to pay. Granted, it’s not what I thought I was buying, but it’s a good enough start to know better next time. Who knows? Maybe I’ll design my own CNC version of the mechanism and 3D print the rest.
The Best Part
The best part is all the video material recorded while exploring these “new to us” models. It’s been way too long since we’ve posted any new videos to our YouTube channel. They pretty much stopped when our beloved Brigel crossed the Rainbow Bridge mid 2022. There’s a short of Brigel’s last days with us to mark the anniversary of his passing, but nothing since.
That’s not the only reason, but it definitely took its toll on us. Another source of concern was the aging computer system we use to edit and render the videos. It was a real screamer in its day… A decade ago! Now its age is definitely showing. Nick gave me an older video card he had that was still more powerful than the one I built the system with. That’s helped for a while. But the old girl is tired…
But not retired. That system has roughly 20TB of storage. Some of it SSD, most of it spindle drives. It provides network access to all our collected works, knowledge, and projects. When we lost two of the 2TB drives, meant to be backups of each other, we lost most of our pictures from 2013 and parts of 2014. It was the motivation to pull the trigger on a new machine.
A New Hope
The new system is more than capable of creating videos. There were some hiccups along the way, like when the boot SSD failed, and it could have been bricked for more than two months. And all this just after finally getting everything squared away and ready to go. Seemed like we just couldn’t catch a break. I took the opportunity to rebuild a new boot drive without all the extra fluff included with Windows 11.
Back up and running, all the while waiting on a warranty replacement SSD. At first it was a struggle just to figure out who was on the hook for the warranty. Once that got resolved, things didn’t improve much. Not until I finally convinced someone in support that having a new computer that’s essentially a brick sitting under my desk for the last two months wasn’t the user experience I expected when I bought it.
He sent me a new 2TB boot SSD express! The best part was I got another 2TB replacement SSD a week or so later through the standard warranty channels! So I bought a set of USB drive cases and now have two external 2TB SSD drives for portable storage. The new computer itself was already treated to an upgrade of a second internal drive, a 4TB SSD!
A New Video
With all that being said, it’s time to start putting out the videos again. I managed to collect up all the relevant material in a “starter” project I can “save as” to any new video project, then just remove the content that’s not related. Maybe I should just export all the bins and import just what I need into the new project. Guess I’ll try both ways.
I use DaVinci Resolve for making videos. It’s just the free version, but has plenty of features even so. Microsoft was pushing their latest Clipchamp “freebie”, but it’s barely capable of editing out the unwanted parts just creating a short excerpt video. Guess I’m spoiled. I’m using version DaVinci Resolve 18.6, but they’ve already pushed out the new 19 release.
The short video clips in these new posts were created just for them, saving the full up content for new YouTube postings. All we need now is that “flashy” intro for the channel. Maybe even a trailer to boot. Just need the inspiration…
Much more to come. Stay tuned!