Dear Bob and Andy, I know exactly what you mean. I have always admired the handgrabs that John and Jerry designed for the PRS fleet of cars, esp. the mounting bracket. We had a similar decision early on with our negotiations over the specs of our PS2 with Mr. W.S. Ting General Mgr. of Sanda Kan. He gave Mike and I a just introduced LifeLike HO Reading Caboose as an example of their workmanship. While we inspected this beautiful model, I noticed one of the ABS hand grabs had broken in the middle. When I saw this I told him that this would not do and we would like our handgrabs rungs to be formed music wire like all S Gauge kits used at the time. Years later a new problem came up with our 2 bay open top hoppers. The ends of the music wire that are buried in the car body of our reefers and boxcars would interfere with each other. We had the choice of rungs that were not perfectly level with each other or to make one side out of plastic so that the buried ends did not interfere. In my opinion, the problem with the PRS handgrabs is the material that they are molded. Styrene is easy to glue but no all that strong. Our bodies were made of ABS, much more robust, a little more difficult to glue, but we requested our handgrabs to be made of delrin (they used Celcon which is Celanese version of delrin). A lot harder to break and glue, but we were assured they had the proper glues. The other problem with delrin is that paint does not like to stick to it. But, with open top hoppers, most are black, or box car red. So we asked that they be cast in the body color so decorating was not a problem. We had the end hand grabs made of delrin while the side rungs be music wire. I felt that most modeler pick up their cars by the sides and not the ends so that the end hand grabs would be touched the least amount... Don
On May 21, 2011 at 10:05 AM cnr3304 <[email protected]> wrote: > I have found that the plastic reefer grabs are not robust enough. They tend > to break especially when you pack a car up to take to a show. > Happy Rapture Day! See you tomorrow? > > Andy Malette > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/S-Scale/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/S-Scale/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: [email protected] [email protected] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [email protected] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
