I’ve been struggling for a while with a “roving” voltage drop during the testing phase of Drag City Mk IV. My new Tomy AFX track initially had a large spot where the power cut off completely. I examined all my connections and re-cleaned the few older pieces of track I’ve bought online and after swapping things around the problem seemed to go away for a while, but then it came back in different form; instead of a complete cut-off there was noticeable voltage drop in one part of the track. So I examined and cleaned and swapped some pieces again, and again it went away, this time for over a week…but then it started again; this time it was affecting a small stretch of track and affecting only one lane rather than both, but it was definitely back.
And here we see the reason why wiring was always my weakest skill when I was building and restoring real cars (says the guy who’s blogging about his electric toys). Without the proper tools, electricity can be maddening!
I knew I had a proper tool somewhere, so on a frigid weekend I went down to my “remote garage” where I keep my 1:1 sized toy cars and all my automotive tools and started digging around through the remnants of a past life. Its always a little sad for me, doing this, as I’ve been mostly out of the hobby for almost a decade now for reasons I won’t go into, but I do still have a lot of tools that I used to build engines, front ends, and do body work. After some shuffling through boxes, I found what I was looking for: my multi-meter.
I hadn’t used the thing in well over 10 years and it had been sitting for all that time in a garage that gets to 15 degrees on winter nights and 110 on summer days, so I was shocked-shocked, I tell you!-when I hit the power button and it came right on! I brought it home determined to chase down my moving “bug” once and for all.
It was a fairly simple matter to pull the controllers off and use a bent paperclip to short the spade connectors on the terminal to simulate full power, and off I went down the track with my two little probes. And sure enough, I found the problem, as well as the answer to why it had eluded me.
Although I had checked all my connections multiple times with a flashlight and a magnifying glass to make sure nothing was cross-connected, I had focused all of my cleaning and replacing on the older sections of track. It turned out that the problem piece was one of the brand new pieces! I hadn’t expected that!
A physical inspection of the 15” straight track piece showed no visible problem, so its something that the eye can’t detect; a manufacturing defect of some kind, I’m sure. I set the offending piece aside marked with a piece of masking tape and replaced it with one of the few similar pieces I hadn’t used which, again, was an older piece I got some time ago on ebay, and there was nothing wrong with that one! I cleaned it beforehand just in case but I’ve got full power all around now.
All of this reminds me…DAMN, I miss Radio Shack!