TS CHENNAI COMES AND GOES AT PORT BOTANY
In my last Blog I resumed an old custom by featuring a photograph of the ship that was bringing the latest shipment of product from our manufacturer in China, in this case, the latest re-run of our AD60 class Garratt locomotive.
At the time of publication of that blog, the Chennai was steaming around in circles of the coast from Newcastle due to all the berths in Port Botany having container ships alongside and it was not until 4.00 am on Saturday that the Chennai was able to tie up and start unloading at Botany.
As this blog is being put together on Sunday night, TS Chennai has left Port Botany for Melbourne hopefully having left all its cargo including AD60s on the wharf for it to pass through customs before being delivered to waiting customers including us here at Eureka Models.
When delivered, the 740 AD60s will join the few units left from the shipment which was delivered by air two weeks ago.
The process followed then is a little bit time consuming but basically all units are un-boxed and given a quick inspection. This production run is proving to be of a very high standard and is well packed so very few issues are being found in this inspection process.
In fact in past production runs of locomotives no local inspections are usually carried out and the inspections done at the factory are relied on for quality control. However, in this case as will be discussed below there was a good reason to open and run each locomotive so a quick inspection was easy to add to the process.
As this process began it was quickly discovered that the three plastic blister packs are almost identical and difficult to tell apart when putting the locomotive units back in their box. To help this process Eureka Models quickly had labels printed which named the front, middle and rear units. As the three units are removed from their blister packs, each blister pack has the identifying label attached making the re-boxing process a whole lot easier.
The main reason for the un-boxing process is the chuff-rate set as default in the Zimo chip. After testing the early production run units received from the factory it was generally accepted that the chuff-rate had been set too fast on the AD60 as delivered. The chuff-rate is easily changed on a Zimo decoder, or it is if you know what to do and have a DCC system that can do it as just about every commercially available system can. After toying with the idea of putting a leaflet in each AD60 to explain how to do it, it was decided to bite the bullet and make the change "in house" as part of the above process. It is a simple and straight forward process, CV 267 is changed to a value of 120 (CV 267 sets the chuff-rate and the default value is 80 on the decoder.) The new value results in a much more realistic synchronisation between sound and motion. It slows the post and packing process down but we think it is worth the effort.
One issue will be that whenever a locomotive has its factory defaults restored the chuff-rate (CV 267) will be re-set to 80 and will have to be changed to 120 for the more satisfactory chuff-rate to apply.
One other issue that cropped up involved the in-ability to tell a with-sound middle unit from a non-sound middle unit. Fortunately, Zimo came to the rescue by providing "Zimo on board" stickers and during the above process one of these stickers is added to the underneath of the middle unit of all "with sound" units to help with the identification process.
The customs process should see the AD60 currently sitting in Port Botany delivered to the Eureka Models offices by the middle of this week and the remaining pre-orders can then be filled and retailers will then quickly receive stock in quantity. It will also mean that Eureka Models will have plenty of stock at Rosehill exhibition on the 25th of October.
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