Athearn Blue Box Santa Fe F7 's

[irishthump]

Did some minor detailing on a couple of covered wagons that I picked up on Ebay. I added some handrails on the doors and nose grabrails and added DCC controlled lights.

 

 

 

I wanted to install a headlight in the front door and a working mars light in the upper headlight. Space can be a bit limited so I used micro leds from Wickness models that I fixed to the back of the headlight lenses. I then sealed the back with black mastic tape which holds everything nicely in place and stops any light from bleeding into the cab.

I used Lenz Standard decoders which give flawless running even with the bog-standard Blue Box motors. The motors were given a good clean and the sintered metal wheels were replaced with nickel silver replacements.

The only glitch was that initially I wired the headlight to the white decoder wire (F0 forward) and the mars light to the green wire (F1). Unfortunately only the white and yellow outputs can be programmed to work like a mars light. So I was forced to rewire the mars light to the yellow function wire and re-map it to work on F1.

 

Here's a short video of them working....

 

[Dave]

Nice job! I love those F7's, particularly in that livery.

[Warbonnet]

Lovely job man, cant beat Warbonnets!

[billyboy]

Thats is pretty good work. I fitted a similar kit to my F7s and it turned out ok.