Back one half of a lifetime ago my wife worked in a credit life
insurance company. Several times she had to employ a private
investigative company to check on RR conductors and brakemen who were
injured (or not) because of slack action. In a similar manner, a former
studio-mate of mine called saying that he had just finished up doing
jury duty on a personal injury case involving "slack action". He said
that I would have throughly enjoyed being there.
Back when the SP was an independent RR, they shut down a minor line
because (I'm told) because workers in a couple of counties were awarded
very large settlements to injuried employees--thus the SP decided to no
longer do business in that area. So this trouble all happens with big
stuff too.
This all brings up something that we have discussed at length on a
semi-regular basis--why don't we have a reliable coupler that satisifies
the vast majority of the S community. Some guys double the springs,
some do the peg thing, while others (myself included) use the knuckle
springs as replacement. These are all Mickey Mouse solutions! Let's
not get into the alternatives here. ie #5's, dummies, AF claws, and
Walthers versions. We can take a nice RTR AM, SHS, DPH or any future
car and spend almost as much time fooling with couplers that it would
take to build a nice kit.
Just maybe it's time for Andy Malette to contact his Canadian
engineering friends to actually design and build such a thing. With all
this time and money wasted I might even trust a pig from Green Acres to
design one! Maybe this is a project that the NASG could help with in
some way. After all we had the NMRA coupler for years until the Kadee
style became the standard. What if we were to start with the Kadee and
move forward?
Bob Werre
On 4/3/13 11:36 AM, pickycat95 wrote:
I've been taking time between layouts after our move to upgrade cars
including reducing slack in the 802s by the method included in the
instructions. The rod inside the spring restricts the side-to-side
action of the coupler. I think the amount of the restriction depends
upon the length of the rod and if the rod is too short then there is
no reduction in the back-and-forth slack or the reduction in slack is
not worth the effort. Assembling the couplers with the rod in the
spring is yet another learned art of eye-hand coordination. Those
little rods just love to slide out of the spring if you tip it the
wrong way from the bench to the coupler box. Testing coupled cars with
the reduced slack on Lionel's AF FastTrack curve has not revealed a
problem with restricted side-to-side.
My first field test of the modified couplers was on Ken's layout with
the 24 coal porters. It was great to see the train start without all
the slack and the associated noise.
Ben Trousdale
--- In [email protected] <mailto:S-Scale%40yahoogroups.com>,
"richgajnak" <rustytraque@...> wrote:
>
>
> I started to double up the centering springs about a year ago. It
seems to reduce the slack bouncy-bouncy quite a bit with no ill
effects. I don't know if it affects the magnetic uncoupling, I only do
manual uncoupling.
>
> Rich G(ajnak)
>
>
> --- In [email protected] <mailto:S-Scale%40yahoogroups.com>,
North Stratford <nsrc119@> wrote:
> >
> > Group,
> > According to the instructions packaged with Kadee couplers, it is
possible to reduce/eliminate the slack action, see attached illustration.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Matt Hogan
> >
>
