# New Aristo Pacific gets the RCS - P8 treatment



## TonyWalsham (Jan 2, 2008)

Recently a very good customer sent me the tender from the new Aristo Craft (AC) Pacific to be converted to RCS battery R/C with Phoenix P8 sound.
This latest version certainly makes conversion to battery R/C easier than the old one did.
The Plug'n'Play socket is underneath the removable coal load so access is quite easy.
There are two ways conversion can be done.
1. The easy way is to simply plug in the RCS # PRO-PnP into the socket, set the TRACK - BATTERY switch to BATTERY and plug in the battery pack into the floating socket at the rear.
2. My customer wanted to have on board batteries. Electrically this is equally easy with the # PRO-PnP as there is a terminal on the pcb so the user can directly connect to on board batteries. This method then uses the floating socket at the rear as a way of adding extra back up batteries in a trail car. This method also permits fully automatic battery back up via the on board batteries, with track power as the primary source.

There is no rear light on the tender so I had to add one. See below.

The brand new tender arrived with noticeable corrosion on the socket pcb. Once I had cleaned that off and re-lacquered the pcb I could start.

Whilst other types of batteries may fit without any tender structural modifications, my customer wanted to use regular twin stick Sub C NiCd's that he is used to. These don't quite fit in the tender between the support stanchions. I had to modify them thus:










Once part of the stanchions have been removed they battery packs will fit snugly body shell.










This is what they look like when mounted, one on each side.










The yellow programming pushbutton was mounted on a scrap of styrene which was glued to the rear of the coal load support.
I drilled a suitable hole in the rear of the tender for a back up light. The warm white bright LED was glued in place with silicone adhesive. The AC socket connection only provides power for the LED and does not control the LED when direction is changed. It is always on. I decided to wire it direct to my own lighting terminals on the # PRO-PnP.

Fortunately the AC socket has been mounted in the tender back a bit from the front of the tender. This enables my regular # BIK-K27 installation kit to fit in the space available. The kit simplifies wiring up the batteries, charge socket, P8 volume control and the P8 programming socket.










Next up was mounting the chuff timing reed switch. The two rare earth magnets were glued to the back of the wheels with ordinary Super Glue.










The # PRO-PnP ESC was plugged into the socket and the various connecting plugs inserted.
The battery pack output from the # BIK-K27 is connected to the two way terminals marked + and -.
The two way terminal with Grey wires near the SMOKE switch reads the motor polarity to get the correct number of toots from the P8 when operating.










The RCS decoder part with the RX plugged in upside down is mounted beside the P8 towards the rear of the chassis.










With the shell back on the wires tuck neatly out of the way.
All the controls are at hand and hidden from view when the coal load is replaced.










As I did not have the loco I could not track test the loco. I could bench test it thoroughly. It checked out just fine.
As soon as my customer gets it up and running and reports back to me I will add his comments here.
Thanks for reading it.

Next up will be another way of doing the job on the Bachmann 2-6-6-2T


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## TonyWalsham (Jan 2, 2008)

A follow up to the installation.

My customer plugged the tender and the loco together and you guessed it, the motor circuit was wired backwards compared to other AristoCraft locos. This confirms the experience of Greg Elmassian and DCC.
Bachmann can get it consistently correct, why can't AristoCraft? Very disappointing. However easily fixed, by swapping the # 5 & # 6 wires in the plug. Either at the socket or on the cable from the loco.

The next problem was rather inconsequential to most installations.
I don't know what AC have done but it was impossible to use the regular socket wiring to switch the loco head light off when going in reverse. It simply stayed on all the time no matter which lighting circuit was switched to ground. So I simply wired one circuit to ground and left it on all the time. Actually that was quite common. The rear light I installed works from my ESC outputs so it comes on in Neutral or Reverse and goes out when the loco is moving Forwards.

Another smallish problem is the AC pcb ground. It seems to float relative to the ESC ground if the battery supply is fed into my ESC via the battery back up terminals. Once I connected the batteries to the wiring from the rear cable connector it worked just fine. However, doing it that way drops the available voltage slightly, which may mean the traction battery voltage has to be increased slightly.
I have no idea what is wrong as the RCS system works fine with other AC locos and all Bachmann socket equipped locos.

I suppose it wasn't broken, so AristoCraft had to fix it. 

Ah Well!!!


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