Model Railway Forum

Evening all

Need some help please fitting a Hornby Black 5 TTS sound decoder to a Hornby Black 5 loco.
Hornby loco and Hornby sound should be straightforward enough but not for me it appears!

Pic01 last screw to take out before removal of tender weight
Pic02 speaker fitted into the tender well, pickup wires and DCC socket wires run in a channel underneath
Pic03 only 1 point to secure the speaker, pillar on the left, however there is a gap and existing screws or screws supplied are not long enough.
Pic04 replace tender weight, I very much doubt it as there is no way to secure it and the decoder hasn't been fitted yet.
Oh and the adapter ring doesn't seem to fit anywhere either.









So is it me being simple or are Hornby actually complicating things of what should be a simple install.
Has anyone done this before and can you advise how it needs to be done and if you have any pics to show.

Link to gallery for bigger pics
https://postimg.cc/gallery/jph4cveu/

Thanks

Pic 4: the decoder socket should be on top of the tender weight, not under it. Thread it though the big hole in the weight.
When I did mine, I replaced the supplied round speaker with a sugarcube speaker (I do that as a matter of course with all my TTS locos) so I didn’t even try to fit the standard speaker - but yours looks to be upside down. I think it is supposed to ‘project’ the sound down towards the track.

Steve, that's the the tricky part in having the decoder socket located on top of the tender weight as the wires are not long enough to reach once the speaker is sat on them, equally the weight should slip down over the pillar on the left.

It would have been beneficial if Hornby had included step by step guide to fitting, even something brief would have helped or even simple video guides on their Hornby channel. The only youtube video I can find is one fitted to a tender of a GWR loco but the tender weight is shorter and the decoder socket appears to be screwed to the tender chassis.

I will take another look this evening and flip the speaker as you suggest but I still don't think the weight will fit back correctly.

Whilst it is adviseable to use the enclosure you can fit the speaker without it and seal the top from the bottom using blak-tak for better acoustics.

I seem to remember a similar installation on RM-Web and a suggestion was to put a piece of plasticard over the hole in the weight.

With regard to detailed instructions if Hornby had to write up a how-to for each and every model variant the instructions would be like a telephone book. They do say some modelling skills are required.

One of the magazines did a special edition last year about fitting DCC and sound to many different locos but they picked all the easy DCC sound ready models to feature, so bit of a no brainer from a help-me point of view.

Screenshot of the Black 5 service sheet - shows the speaker facing down.

That's brilliant Steve, very helpful, many thanks for looking

All done, fitted and working perfectly, now onto the other Black 5, the William Stanier and Brit (for starters)

Cheers for searching out the diagram Steve, something simple as that helped, shame that one simple diagram could not be included on the loco or decoder instructions.

All of these diagrams are fairly easy to find.

Even easier than f you have this link:

https://www.hornby.com/uk-en/downloads/

It helps if you know the R number for Hornby models.

As I said earlier, I swap the standard speaker for a sugarcube speaker - it’s generally accepted that the standard one is poor quality and the sugarcube seems give a better sound and are much easier to fit in tight spaces. I use these:

http://www.youchoos.co.uk/Index-Shop.php?L1=Speakers

When I did mine I used one of the Flame speakers from Youchoos, easy the fit and a big improvement on the factory supplied option

Paul