With the headlight bracket in place I was able to determine that there was lots of room for the small LokSound decoder to fit just behind it and adequate space for all the decoder wires. The decoder was also held in place with a small piece of double-sided carpet tape. Now, if you're like me, one of the biggest problems with installing decoders in a small space is what to do with all those darn wires. Well, I decided to make a small circuit board that would fit between the speaker and decoder to which I could solder corresponding wires, thus eliminating a lot of space-consuming, shrink-wrapped wire joints and at the same time keeping the wires neat and organized. To do this I cut a small piece of blank copper-clad circuit board to fit the width of the styrene mounting blank and just long enough to allow room for soldering two or three wires. After determining the number of sets of wires that were to be soldered to the board, I evenly divided the board into that many strips and took a razor saw and cut slots the length of the board to isolate each strip. I attached the circuit board to the blank with thin double sided tape. Another advantage to this method is that it is much easier to remove wires from the board by touching a soldering iron to them rather than having to cut apart a shrink wrapped joint. Believe me, I know from firsthand experience.
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