Having picked up a handful of the new Farish MBAs over the weekend, today I thought I'd set about adding body mounted knuckle couplers to them. The outer ends of the outer 2 wagons retain Rapidos in NEM pockets for coupling to locos. The inner ends of these two, and both ends of the inner wagons have been fitted with a Microtrains coupler mounted at bufferbeam height. On the buffer fitted wagons, this represents the swinghead coupler, and the inners are fitted with a fixed knuckle, though of course on the model the only variation is whether it has buffers or not

The original bogie mounted Rapido in an NEM pocket which is retained on the outer end of the outer wagons

Before and after - note the coupler pocket had to be trimmed to allow for bogie swing. The lid of the coupler box has been left off, using the base of the wagon as the top. To aid construction, one end of the spring was glued to the top half of the knuckle head piece

Doesn't look too shabby once coupled!

The coupling gap is closed up a bit with the knuckles fitted. It could be shrunk further by setting the Microtrains coupler further back into the wagon, but this would restrict bogie rotation for tight curves

Both with an without buffers, side by side

I'll wait until I have a couple more wagons to make up the set before weathering and making a scrap load.

A complete aside from the rest of the post, I do like this Windows 7 malarky, got Raiders of the Lost Ark playing in the right window, and I'm typing this in the left window.

Ace!