Carrera power supply update

[proxieken]

I posted this before and got advice on what to purchase. Instead of listening I went out and found a Carrera digital 1/24 power supply. (found one really cheap at a store)

We had been racing our 1/24 cars with the 1/32 power supply.

So we hooked it up and with 5 cars on- it dies. When we try to drive it just shuts down and the control unit has to reset.

I was thinking it is supposed to be able to handle 4 cars plus a ghost, so 5 should be OK.

We ran 5 cars on the 132 power supply fine, they were just slow.

Later a few guys had to leave so we tried running the 124 supply again, this time with only 3 cars. And it died sometimes. When we all gunned it on a start it would shut down and the control unit would have to reset itself. We had to pull out a little slower and it was OK.

I went with the Carrera unit instead of the aftermarket because I did not want to fry the expensive control unit and I do not know enough about the specs to feel comfortable with messing around. However, this is not going to work at all.

So I guess I will have to risk frying the control unit and get something else. I would really like to be able to run 4-6 124 cars at a time without issues. But I am not an engineer so this is going to be tricky. We run the cars box stock, magnets and all.

[RazorJon]

If you put a fuse between your CU and PS it will be fine, start with a 1.5 amp fuse

[cagee13]

The CU has a built in safety at 8 amps. So put an inline fuse holder on the positive side wire between the CU and power supply with a 7 amp fuse. I did this so that if something was to blow it would be the fuse before it met the max of the CU.

[cagee13]

Since I have done this I've had 0 issues and been running it over a year now. If you would like some pics let me know and I'll post some on how to wire it.

[proxieken]

Tonight we had the usual bare knuckle crash fest we call a race. One of the guys has a lot of knowledge of electricity. He wired an old analog 124 transformer in parallel with my digital 124 transformer. It kept the voltage and amps the same, but the 2 of them worked together to spread out the current draw and it worked fantastic. I was very unsure what to do and did not want to fry anything, but he spent a couple minutes and we were racing like maniacs. We could not run 3 cars before and now we were running 5. We even tried to trip it by lining up and gunning all 5 cars at once. It never skipped a beat.

I am now going to do this with the 132 power supply. It really helps keep things well powered all around the track and eliminates the "sluggish" spots you can get here and there.

Right now I feel very comfortable to run 6 magnet cars at a time with these 2 power packs wired up like this. And the more we run 1/24 the more it seems to be getting to be a favorite.