I was afraid of converting this beautiful locomotive to DCC, but I don't want to have my trains static in a display cabinet. This is the most detailed Kato locomotive I've ever seen, an special edition of the 50th anniversary that comes with a nice box, booklet and DVD:
To open the locomotive, everything is clipped. You don't need to unscrew anything, but for better understanding on how to open it check the following web page that has nice self explaining pictures. Doesn't matter if you don't understand Japanese:
Isolating the motor is as easy as cutting or desoldering the wires:
And you have plenty of space inside the tender, you can use almost any small N scale decoder and there is a hole to pass the wires to the main body:
Trim the motor wires to the right size and solder them to the motor wires:
Do not forget to isolate it with Kapton tape or heat shrink:
Current wires can be soldered to the little cooper plate as seen in the following photo. You will have to scratch this plate with any sharpened tool to allow tin to stick on:
And there is almost nothing more to do!!! Just one more note (I don't have photos of this step, sorry!) but I had to trim a little bit the shell to be able to close it as there is not enough space for the motor wires:
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