Following on from my first offering, a few more thoughts. First up, the airfix mounting and working round/with them. First option - remove the whole lot, mount a No. 5 at bufferbeam height and jobs done (1). Second option, the mounting is at near-as-blow it the height of an NEM pocket. So is it possible to insinuate (remove the central pin, slot in the coupler, secure with superglue) a NEM fitted kaydee with the cranked shank? Yep, it seems to work (2). On to Dapol. They continued the airfix mounting, as currently do Hornby. However they also used their own screw mounted effort, as seen on their pug. These are dead easy, just take a no. 18 kaydee and drill a hole for the screw in the shank. Job done!(3)

Now, a few thoughts on faultfinding. First up, alignment, vertical and horizontal. The coupler must be on the centre line of the vehicle and the height checked against the gauge. Second, drooping couplers. Usually due to the NEM pocket being slightly too deep (although on Bachman check that where the pocket sits in the vertical dovetail it’s fully home at the top). If this doesn’t cure it, try adding a shim of micro strip (about 10thou thick, about 1/8” long) into the pocket under the coupler (4). So there’s before (5) and after (6).

Other issues can be when trying to pull a rake of vehicles ove the uncoupling magnet and they keep uncoupling when you don’t want them to. Kaydees need to be kept under tension to avoid this. What usually causes this is the steel ballast weight being attracted to the magnet and the wagon being too free running or light to prevent this pulling them forward, thus releasing the tension on the coupling. So I remove any steel weights and replace them with lead shot (secured with clear UHU glue or superglue and the coarse shot used is due to being given 3 1kg jars of it) as seen on the lowmac in (1), or these two sea cow ballast hoppers(7). If there’s no space for the shot, add a load (such as this whitemetal TE20 tractor in this dropside) (8). Despite all this, you can still have problems with the steel axles being attracted to the magnet. The way I attend to this is to gently brake the wagon, using slivers of foam core board to rub on the wheel or axle (9).

Anyway, a few more thoughts. As I said earlier, not the best, proper or official methods, but they work for me.