Scalextric cars - Capacitor or resistor on motor?

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Scalextric cars - Capacitor or resistor on motor?

Postby Racer944 » Thu Feb 15, 2018 11:24 am

Hi Folks;

I am converting some of my Scalextric cars to Carrera digital. I know its best to take off the components under the heat shrink on the braid wires and run wires direct from chip to braids, but what exactly is on the motor? It looks like the motor wires and rear lighting wires go through what looks like a resistor or maybe a capacitor... What does it do, and is it needed? Can I just run the light wires and the motor wires direct to the chip without using these components?

Note that I do not intend to run theses converted cars on Scalextric track at any point...

Cheers;
Eric
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Re: Scalextric cars - Capacitor or resistor on motor?

Postby carlosinseattle » Thu Feb 15, 2018 1:39 pm

Those components aren't necessary for Carrera digital. The orange thing is a capacitor, it stores a tiny amount of energy, it's helpful/necessary for Scalextric digital but does the opposite with Carrera digital so get rid of it both at the braid end and at the motor. It actually does no harm on the motor end, but just not necessary.

The little ferrite beads (little graphite looking tubes that go around the wires) won't make any difference whether you keep them or get rid of them; their function is to remove a small amount of electronic interference/noise.

You can simply clip the leads off the capacitor(s) and you'll be good to go.
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Re: Scalextric cars - Capacitor or resistor on motor?

Postby RichD » Fri Feb 16, 2018 9:07 am

The capacitor is part of the RFI filter. If you were running Scalextric digital you would have to leave both the capacitor and the ferrite bead in place or RFI generated by the motor would interfere with the operation of the digital system. Scalextric digital cars have another filter between the pickup and the digital chip. That would be there to keep RFI generated by sparking pickups from interfering with the digital signal. I am not certain about the Carrera system. Regular Carrera cars also have an RFI filter with green inductors on a circuit board and capacitors on the motor itself. Older Carrera cars had both the inductors and capacitors on the motor. You would probably be better off leaving the RFI filter intact, in any case it would not hurt anything. With older Carrera cars the inductors could fail, since they are in series with the motor when they failed the car would go dead, so most people removed them.
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