Walthers/Life Like DL-109 DCC Install

I'm continuing to plug along with installing DCC in locos I've collected in the pre-DCC era. The latest is this Walthers post-Life Like DL-109:

This is an easy plug-and-play install using a Digitrax DH165L0 decoder. The old Life Like circuit boards, which Walthers continued to use, were backward from the usual standard, with male 8-pin prongs on the board itself, rather than sockets for the 8-pin NMRA plug. The Life Like circuitry had an 8-pin socket, which you remove from the Life Like circuit board, and you discard the circuit board entirely. You then replace the circuit board with the Digitrax decoder. No soldering is needed, and the Walthers version of the loco already has an LED headlight.

The only difficulty I found was that the front coupler on these units sits in a unique swivel mount that easily falls apart and scatters its pieces when you unscrew it to remove the loco shell. I spent quite a lot of time retrieving the parts and getting things back together once I installed the decoder, but now I know what to look out for in the future, since I have another New Haven and two Rock Islands still to do.