Farish N Gauge Class 42 Warship diesel with Zimo MS sound

Kit: MS480 hard-wired; SugarCurve7; STACO3A stay-alive kit; cab lights; crew

Revisiting Graham Farish's Class 42 Warship this time to fit a Zimo MS sound kit and big stay-alive. Though this is a 2023 release of the Warship, the design is unchanged from previous generations, with 6pin DCC socket and directional lighting.

We still with the usual approach, separating the chassis and milling off a low/flat platform for the speaker. The remainder of the chassis can be left untouched.

We test-fit our SugarCurve7 spekaer with the body on to check that it will all fit flush later on.

We can also do the 2 purple wires for the speaker. Note we have used black electrical tape on top of the chassis to protect against short-circuits, then double-sided tape to keep the kit in position as we work. We have also added a blue wire ready to use as common positive for the lighting, as well as the blue and grey wires at the other end of the decoder for our stay-alive.

We find it easier to remove all the wires from the MS480 decoder and all fresh wires as we go along - the first to be added are the motor (orange and grey), which we soldered direct to the motor tabs when we had the chassis apart. Then the black and red pickup wires.

Talking of stay-alive, here is our STACO3A kit, which is a small PCB for managing the charge, and 2 mini GoldCaps joined in parallel. GoldCaps take a few seconds to charge up, but the effect last for a few seconds, so is a great solution.

We find a home for the GoldCaps, wrapped in Kapton tape, and the STACO PCB fits in next to one of the track connections (we snipped a bit of the original PCB from the model and re-used the rings for the pickups!).

Since the lighting outputs from the MS480 are all full power outputs, we need resistors to protect our LEDs. The original PCB from the model included a little bank of 4 of these, so we snip that out carefully, work out which side is the common for them, and position that with our blue wire to the common side. 4 resistors is perfect - one for end #1, one for end #2 and one for each cab light that we intend to add.

For the directional lighting, we remove all of the original wires from the lighting units and put some fresh, flexible wires on instead - blue for common positive, white for headlights and yellow wire for the red tail light. Same at both ends.

These are inserted into the chassis slots and wires carefully routed. Blue goes to one of the resistors, and the white/yellow wired can go to F0F, F0R, FA1 and FA2 - using 4 separate outputs from the decoder allows us to have independent control of the red tails lights from the headcode lights. Some CV changes are required compared to the default Warship project, but it is quite simple to remap. Eventually we will use FKey0 for the headcodes, FKey6 for the red tails, and FKey12 for the cab lights, all directional.

To add crew and cab lights, the cabs need to be very carefully removed. We take out the lighting sheild and ducts - the best way to remove the clear ducts is to push them out from the outside using a fine point, otherwise they break very easily.

Our drivers are placed in their seats - these are our own 3D printed YouChoos driver figures in N guage. The mini SMD white LEDs are drilled through the top/back of the cab wall and glued in position, pointing upwards is best to disperse the light better (LEDs not shown here).

We then begin the process of attaching the final wires - FA5 and FA6 are used for the cab lights on an MS480 (FA3 and FA4 are no go because they are Logic-Level only, not full power outputs). Note that FA6 is on the reverse side of the MS480.

Once everything is connected, we can test, tidy up with Kapton tape, and finally put the body back on.

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