DCC help with kato's Kiha 35's

[comeng84]

Hello

I am a new user here @ the JNS Forum and have a question that has been killing me for some time

I am looking at converting my collection of locos and passenger stock to DCC control and I am just about ready for the deployment - only to be "derailed" by three cute little metropolitan red colored diesel rail cars.

My 3x Kato Kiha 35's/36 set. I can't find anything on the interwebs that gives a description on installation. And its driving me bonkers. Can anybody help?

Cheers

[David]

You've got me stumped. In addition to the production date (2009?) the body mounted couplers and no shroud inside the cab to hide a lightboard suggests it has tooling similar to the Kiha110 - Kato's 'almost' DCC tooling that is harder to convert then the previous bulb based DC stuff because of the tightly hidden SMD LED lightboard.

[CaptOblivious]

Here is a tutorial from NGDCC, using (naturally) a NGDCC decoder.
http://www.moemoe.gr.jp/~chacha/dcc/de22x6k/

The NGDCC DE11x6K decoder has roughly the same dimensions as the Digitrakx DN163K0, but the Digitrax decoder uses some pretty large components, and has large LEDs wired in that would interfere with reassembly. You might have a look at using a TCS K0D8-D and a pair of right-angle surface mount LEDs. If you don't mind soldering all that together, this looks like an easy install.

I thought it would be like the KIHA110, too, but it looks like the internals are radically different...

[comeng84]

Thanks guys much appreciated 

[David]

That's certainly a first, a passenger car using a locomotive lightboard. I didn't realize the tail lights don't operate, in itself odd given that this a fairly recently tooling.

[comeng84]

So here is another question.

Where does one purchased these DCC boards from? A quick Google reviealed lots of Japanese pages... and my Japanese is limited (zero)

Is there an english speaking page that sells them. I already checked my usual suppliers of fine Japanese trains (Hobby Search and ebay) and they dont stock them 

[CaptOblivious]

So here is another question.

Where does one purchased these DCC boards from? A quick Google reviealed lots of Japanese pages... and my Japanese is limited (zero)

Is there an english speaking page that sells them. I already checked my usual suppliers of fine Japanese trains (Hobby Search and ebay) and they dont stock them  

You can order via email directly from Shuhei Nagasue-san, the sole proprietor; he understands English quite well.
Website:
http://www.snjpn.com/ngdcc/indexj.htm
email:
shuhei@snjpn.com