Hi Dave;
Don has a bit of an advantage, since he is already producing SHS trains. I'm
sure it was still a financial and time drain he would rather have done without
except that the F unit project pretty much required the new couplers.
The reality is that S with the 802/808/SHS couplers is no worse off than most
HO which is run with the factory supplied couplers. Until a few years ago,
those were horn-hook designs. I'm quite sure a lot of modelers kept them,
although most "serious" HO modelers changed them out for Kadee #5s. More
recently HO models generally come with Kadee-compatible plastic "clones" of the
#5, I suspect most cars keep them or swap for the more robust metal Kadees.
Accurail was amoung the early producers of a "scale size" coupler in HO. The
Accumate is pretty nice looking, and comes with a scale draft gear coupler box,
also supplied by Sergent for their HO coupler. I suspect that the availablity
of the #5 clones and the other brands of scale sized coupler is what forced
Kadee's hand in producing the #78 and #58 "scale" couplers. Without that
competition, there's nothing driving them in S.
Since Kadee has pretty much said outright they are not interested in making a
new coupler S, the options seem to be finding another maker or using the
current products. A suspect Accurail isn't interested, and their split-shank
design in plastic might not be robust enough in sue for S (or as accurate as
desired - it's scale size in S but the head design is still not fully
prototypical). McHenry is now owned by the same company that owns Athearn; they
probably aren't hungry enough to go into S either.
It's interesting that the discussion has mostly centered on the coupler head
size, less so on the the SHAPE and I didn't notice anyone at all mention that
the shank size and configuration make the draft gear too wide (which sometimes
makes postitioning of end sill details difficult on models.
Pieter E. Roos
Railroad Home Page at
www.geocities.com/pieter_roos/pieter_1.html
--- On Mon, 9/8/08, ctxmf74 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
From: ctxmf74 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: {S-Scale List} More coupler talk
To: [email protected]
Date: Monday, September 8, 2008, 12:16 PM
--- In [email protected], Don Thompson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>More coupler history.....
>
Hi Don, Interesting. Did you have any problems getting your new
coupler designed and produced? Sounds like the guys who want different
couplers could do something similiar?
Regards, Dave Branum
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