OK, time for another photo essay. This one is about upgrading an ancient car from horn-hooks to Kadee knuckles.
The car is an old, old model made by Crown in the early 1960's. They are all plastic, except for the truck mounting screws and, on these, the wire that holds the logs on. (Oh, wait a minute. Take a look at the trucks. Those are real springs. Weird.) Anyway, these cars have 4 trucks each, mounted on a bar underneath the car, with a pivot halfway between the trucks.
The coupler is mounted on the bar. I thought about body-mounting these, but I've got mostly 18-inch radius curves. With the mounting point for the coupler bar so far back, there's substantial over-swing of the car ends. So, I decided to stick with the original mountings.
Here, I've taken the truck assemblies off. (Yeah, I switched cars, too. I've got 2 black, one rust of these. I thought the rust-colored parts showed up better in the photos.) You can see that the coupler pocket cover plate is held in place by melting down the pin. That makes it a one-time assembly, but saves the cost of a screw. These cars cost a dollar, brand new from my LHS. That's one way to keep the cost down.
I popped the covers off with a knife. On these two, the pins actually stayed attached to pocket. On most of these, the pin comes off with the cover. It doesn't matter, because the pin is the wrong size, anyway, and the whole pocket has to go.
I rough-cut the pockets and pins off with my Dremel wheel, and then shaved them flat with a knife. To get a good surface for gluing, I sanded them flat. Then, I took a set of Kadee draft gear boxes and glued the flat plate directly to the plate. Normally, I attach my draft gear boxes with screws, but in this case, there's just no way to do that. Plain styrene glue holds this very well.
I like the #58 couplers. I've got the spring assemblies in place here, and one of the couplers has been placed on the assembly inside the spring. The next step is to glue the pocket covers on. It's important here to be careful with the glue. Make sure it doesn't get on the working parts of the spring, or on the new coupler pin shift. I just put a bit on both sides, slip the cover on and hold it in place until the glue sets.
Almost done. Here, the covers are glued on.
The last step, as with any coupler install, is to try it out on a test track with the Kadee coupler gauge.
And then, put the whole track assembly back on the car, repeat until all your horn-hooks are gone, and run some trains!
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.
Sorry, guys, I should have mentioned that this is the undergraduate version. The advanced graduate-level stuff has to deal with the non-optimal cases.
Yes, these couplers came out low. I'm still having trouble with the trucks, too. I'll probably shim them up with washers, which will both raise the couplers and reduce the very high rotational friction I'm seeing. These are cheap cars, remember. A couple of the pins that hold the pivot bar have cracked, making them larger. I've already drilled out the center hole in the trucks, and added graphite lubricant, but they still don't turn freely.
The couplers are #58's. At the time I bought a big pile of them, Kadee wasn't making that size coupler in the whisker version. If you look very closely, the coupler gauge has a #5 on it, which is a bit misleading.
Oh yes, I've experienced this less than fun process more than enough. I still have a bunch of cars to do this to.
-beegle55 (GO WVU!)