Tna american Percy turned into American James

Hi everyone
Cow’s Trackmaster’s made a fantastic discovery.
https://youtu.be/cK0xp8O2TL4
he squeezed the circuit board and the tna Percy made the James start up noise. Any way to explain this? Thanks

Wow, this is fantastic! Makes you wonder if all of them had the audio files for all three engines on the chip and were programmed to only access the ones for that specific engine. Perhaps they were accidentally added onto Cow’s model specifically

He also just uploaded a clearer video of it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4T2N0e4sm8

In the second video you can see that the James voice actually changed pitch a couple times, very interesting indeed. Is it possible for you to test this with yours, Owen?

Yes I know he did upload that. Also, this applies to all the American Percy’s. I tried it on mine (you squeeze a certain point on the board) and it makes the James noise. It’s amazing

I discovered a semi-permanent and nondestructive way to do this around the begining of this year. The US Talk n Action James is pretty rare and it would be very easy to flood the market with undetectable fakes using parts from a Percy and a James shell. In the interest of both preserving "authentic" US Jameses for serious collectors and preventing people from "getting rich quick" at the expense of others who are none the wiser, I personally do not think this is a conversion which should be done, and will not be sharing how to do it

Just know it can be done, and please be wary of US James from this point forward. I don't know if anyone else knows the way to make it "permanent," and there's no way to know without opening your US James up and knowing what the conversion looks like. Unfortunately, this creates a catch 22 situation where when people know how to spot fakes then people also know how to create undetectable ones.

I just did this to my British Percy, voice is gone. Anyone know where to find the small chips? The small black rectangles



I believe the number is 334

That is a 330 Kohm surface mount resistor. Unfortunately, you probably don't have the tools or skill handy to replace it easily - maybe someone here does, personally a few comparatively large passive components are about my level of surface mount soldering skills.

Please, don't bend your Percy circuit board to try to get it to speak James, it'll probably just break it. If you hit that black glob which is a specially made silicon die applied directly on top of the PCB and then "glopped" over instead of putting it into a proper package and is not a publicly available part like the surface mount components around it, its game over, there is no repair from even the best micro-solderer

Yea…what if the 334 resistor fell off the board? Would I be able to send it to someone to get it fixed?

Should I ping Ripley802 in this case? I feel like he can replace the mount resistors on my uk Percy and Thomas (I tired the same thing on uk Thomas) (don’t worry my uk Thomas is for spares) I think he can fix those in this case. But if anyone knows someone to replace these, I would be more than happy to contact them.

I found the resistors on ebay…hopefully they get here before my school year starts…