repair centers/ model train manufactures

[ED WHITFORD]

[:(] I was at my dads home the other day working on some repairs & getting some parts for things i have here. He them asked me if I have had any problems getting parts thru some of the kind folks I deal with, when I said no he then told me that the dealer he uses has herd this. If this is to be true then all of us with the older pre/post or even new items might become like the dinosore.[?]

"Sorry Kieth but, some of the parts you need I can no longer get". when asked why he told my dad. "The (manufacture of that line of model trains) has closed down that supplier who made those parts for me". He did tell my dad who the manufacture is but I don't think I can post it on here. He went on to say " That is about the 3-4 parts maker they shut down in the past couple of years, They told them that they want people to buy the new stuff & do away with the old". "If they want the old stuff they will have to get the parts thru us if we have them. But we do not want persons making parts out of thier homes/garages to repair the older trains".

[V] I find this unbeliveable but, this dealer has been supplying my dad for the past 15+ years & I know that even when I have talked to him about parts, He has basically told me the same thing. As for the manufacture of this line of toy trains I have been waiting almost a year now for a simple whistleing electronic board for a tender that has been in the shop since then for warrenty work.
Called them & was told the warrenty has expired 6 months ago, been waiting a year. Did not matter I was told the customer would have to buy a new tender.[:(!]

Has any one else had/ heard of such things happening. If this is going to be a future trend in the repaire end of the hobby it could very well be it's down fall. As well as the hobbies. We as repair centers have a good customer base, In return keeping us a good customer base for the manufactures. But if this is the trend of the manufactures customer service then I think I can do with out.

[thor]

Yes this is the way manufacturing in general is going, has been going, for quite some time now. It really started with that infamous legend "No user serviceable parts inside" that started appearing on electronics around the mid 70's but as more and more manufacturers switched to the 'just in time' method of making things, the small parts suppliers who specialised in certain components couldn't stay afloat because they relied on bidding for a run of a certain component rather than a few.

However in my opinion this need not be a bad thing for a repair center, it might be a good thing because theres quite a lot of customer resistance to the throwaway mentality and people are making a living supplying what is needed to keep old equipment running. The repair center might have to modernize its way of doing business but the business is out there to be done, more and more of it.

What parts are you talking about? Its easy to substitute motors, electronic components and circuit boards arent hard to assemble, if I needed a small gear for example, or a gearset of a specific size, I'd go looking thru Thomsons or other manufacturer listings. theres a lot of hungry, helpful manufaturers ready and willing to accept small orders.

In the robotics world of which I was a part, prototyping is a constant fact of life. You often need a part that simply cant be bought off the shelf but you can make it yourself with a computer controlled lathe, milling machine and Autodesk Animator or similar 3d software which outputs CNC commands to enable your construct to be produced from solid or even now, 'grown' from liquid plastics with a laser array that works like a 3d printer. These setups are getting surprisingly reasonably priced - not cheap but not prohibitively expensive. Theres quite a few places that have made the investment and are looking for work.

Its a good idea to detail someone, yourself or a geek, to comb the net in search of facilities and product manufacturers that will meet your needs. One needs to remain current with this info as these sources tend to pop up and disappear, reappear, amalgamate and so on. Being well informed is a definite necessity and someone in your business should be inventive in their searches because its truly astonishing whats out there.

One of my hobbies is restoring old motorcycles and I've found that there's nothing you can't find if you look hard enough but how you look is very important, if you ask for a specific narrowly defined object you'll like as not draw a blank, widen the search terms and who knows, you may find, for example, a washing machine specialist has the gearset you need (Maytag used to use an IC engine and gearbox for one of their models).

A good working knowledge of your subject is essential, of course, because manufacturers outsourced sub-assemblies and components to smaller manufacturers who frequently used the same assembly to satisfy several different customers. When spares of the Mikuni oil pump used on 70's two stroke Suzukis ran dry, I knew that the same pump would have been used by Yamaha, Kawasaki and who knows what else consumer small engined goods. Ask for the Suzuki part number and the parts guys only know whats shown on their 'fiche, whereas that pump is actually still in production only now in India under a different name.

Sometimes you'll just have to substitute a similar mechanism then of course its up to your customer, if they want a repair thats like the original you can offer them the option of having their locomotive working with a new mechanism, or a long wait till the spares emerge from somewhere or no more working loco.

On balance though, I believe that manufacturers with short sighted greedy attitudes are giving us a potential goldmine in terms of future work opportunities. I would like to see small business cooperatives spring up here in America, pooling the resources and talents of people like you and I, I believe that there's a great future in something like that and I have good reason for thinking so having been involved in that sort of work for most of my life, albeit more to do with motorcycles than trains. The guy I used to work for making repro Norton parts with his son, now has his son making complete reproductions of classic Norton racers and doing very well at it. They are better than the originals thanks to modern materials and technology.

There's no reason why the same can't happen with trains. Well, it did, didn't MTH get started like this?