DutyDruid

On 07/04/2019 at 08:11, 47137 said:

 

Any joy?

 

I've got all the bits I need, now all I need is the time to drive the pin out of the coupler head to separate it from the swallow tail and fit it to the AMF87 bits I collected from Brackley.  A friend has said he will provide me with a suitably shaped block to make this easier which I should receive this evening. 

Intention is to try to fit it all together while I shop-keep tomorrow, but first sight of the Roco 40287 coupler is that is indeed the same drop as a Bachmann cranked coupler.  Photo will follow when it's done.

18 minutes ago, ejstubbs said:

11.68mm vs 10.76mm for the #19

Just got home and have measured a #19 vs #20.  I must have taken a "different" measurement from yours - mine was from end of swallowtail to shoulder where knuckle head is fixed using a digital calliper - and I made the #20 thereabouts 1.25mm longer which, when you remember you are putting one on each coach, will increase the distance between vehicles by 2.5mm

On 26/03/2019 at 12:24, Butler Henderson said:

How is the coupling held at the right height? If it works okay maybe someone (thinks Gaugemaster) should commission Roco  to produce packs of the mount only and supply them with a template for reshaping the NEM362 Kadee to a NEM363 as an option to buying  the adaptor fret as well.

So, I've just been on the phone with Gaugemaster and asked that very question and they drew my attention to this variation on the theme - Roco 40287 - which in itself is an interesting concept given that that's the coupler Hornby use to close couple coaches.

I have to go up the M40 next week and have arranged to collect the coupler head to NEM363 adapter from Brackley, now need to organise to go to Gaugemaster to collect the ROCO 40287 thingy.

Not having come across the NEM363 standard before but seeing that several manufacturers whose names I recognise as big in the continental world seem to use it, I wonder if Kadee could be persuaded to make a head with an NEM363 adaptor ready fitted?

Elliott

1 hour ago, melmerby said:

Most with cranked couplings have the NEM mount as part of the underframe moulding so not an option.

(that's all the wagons with cranked couplings I have/had)

The later "upgrades" which have straight T/Ls do have a screw on mount and a #18 is a straight replacement so no need for surgery anyway.

Ok, my observation of the wagons I've butchered in the project to convert Nictun Borrud to use Kadees is the opposite, all the mounting blocks on those wagons that are designed to take cranked couplings can be unscrewed and replaced.  (In fact, the Bachmann rep came into the shop where I work part-time one day and I was able to strip two LOWFITs down to show him the problem and ask him if he could get me the deeper blocks as a spare - sadly he wasn't impressed...)

2 hours ago, 47137 said:

I've stumbled upon a possible solution for installing Kadee couplers into Bachmann stock with the NEM pockets at a non-standard height.

 

1) The Roco universal coupler

2) The AMF87 adaptor fret

If this works it looks like it's "problem solved".  Have you tried it Richard or have you just noticed its potential as a solution?

2 hours ago, ejstubbs said:

Looks elegant, but at another £2.50-odd per coupling might be a bit daunting.  (Kadees are expensive enough as it is!)

Yes, but I would only look to use this system in "difficult" situations like the rear end of the 4MT Tank.  On wagons &c where a cranked coupling is used I think I would be looking to pack the whole mount down on 3 x strips of 0.040" plastic strip; the Parkside Coupling Mount PA34 is designed with the Bachmann cranked coupler in mind and that's all I have ever done to convert them to straight couplings.

On 02/03/2019 at 13:59, melmerby said:

I've found a problem with using Kadees on the 45XX, I don't whether the Std 4 tank has the same arrangement.

The pony truck is quite narrow compared to the back to back of the wheelset and (especially when pushing) there is a tendency for the truck to swing to the side a few mm meaning the Kadee won't couple with another as it is too far off centre.

With T/L couplings this wasn't a problem as it was within the side play tolerance.

Looks like I need some spacers to limit the axle side-play.

I said I would put a photo of the 4MT rear pony truck up:  Herewith.

The NEM pocket is clearly a separate entity from the pony truck.  It's a non-standard pocket and it only takes 3 insertion/removal cycles to wear out whatever is in the pocket that holds the coupling in place.  I started to build the new coupling mount but got too distracted so that's now become a job for next week's session.

5 hours ago, melmerby said:

I don't whether the Std 4 tank has the same arrangement.

Sorry, can't answer that at the moment as I am at a Great Missenden weekend so can't look at mine.  When I get home tomorrow I will photograph the underside and post.

5 hours ago, melmerby said:

Presumably that means the T/L couplings each end aren't the same?

At least on the 45XX they were, even if they were at the wrong height and wrong horizontal position!

Correct, the front one is straight through but the rear one is cranked.  

5 hours ago, Butler Henderson said:

Re the standard 4 tank you need an extra piece of packing  for the bunker end as the coupling mount their is crazily set even further higher, 

Thanks for the heads up with that, next window for serious modelling is Tuesday and I will have a look then...

20 hours ago, melmerby said:

 

I have fitted Kadees to my first Bachmann 45XX (Non DCC Ready)

Here's how.

 

 

Like this a lot and it's given me food for thought, thanks for posting it.

I did ask here for ideas about dealing with a Bachmann 4MT tank that had the same problem June/July/August time last year and Butler Henderson posted a picture of a cut & shut of a Kadee head to a cranked Bachmann coupler (if I could remember how to link back to quote a much earlier post I would have done so but I'm afraid it's been a long day and the brain is failing).  Sadly I chose not to follow his advice because I was a bit dubious that about making an assembly that was strong enough to withstand heavy exhibition use so I went down the road of trying to fabricate an NEM pocket from Evergreen styrene oblong tube to fit on the bottom/back of the 4MT but it didn't work first time and got put in the "too difficult" box because of other pressing jobs. 

Having seen this I think I will have a go at knocking up an adapter like this.

Elliott

Have just looked at my pair of 4MT 2-6-4Ts, on one I have done the chopped combination of a NEM Kadee glued with plastic card packing to the remains of a NEM shank as I described earlier; on the other I have glued and bolted a chopped NEM Kadee to a the shank of a Bachmann stepped coupling (one of the ones that  comes with wagons).

 

IMG_20180819_095833475.jpg

Thanks for that!

To my mind the non-compliant NEM pocket is waste of time and would be better done away with.

I did once have that conversation with a Bachmann rep and - like the sales department in Dilbert cartoons - he displayed a complete lack of understanding of the problem and more or less told me that I shouldn't be doing things like that.  ( I was actually asking if it was possible to get the NEM mounting blocks they use as a spare part)

The 4MT Tank is a strange arrangement under the bunker.  Mine is currently down at the Fareham Club in the stock box for Nictun Borrud.  If I get a chance I will photograph it and post here, but put simply there is no room to put a Kadee with a draft box in place.  The NEM pocket is on the sort of mount they use on Mk1 coaches (I refer to this as a Keen Mount as it closely resembles the Keen Close Coupler System).  If I were to cut this off and mount - let's say - a No 5 coupler no matter how small the draft box was it would foul the rear pony truck to a greater or lesser extent meaning that the loco wouldn't be able to negotiate any sort of curve.

I'm going to investigate the possibility of cutting and shutting a stepped Bachmann coupler and a Kadee No 18 NEM coupler, and I will also try to do the math to see if my homemade NEM pocket could be fixed below the existing one without fouling the rear pony truck assembly and report back - but this might not happen until Tuesday!

 

Fix  a #146 in place (the lip on the top surface of the gearbox need to come off):

kadee 103.jpg

 

 

Been off grid for a few days so haven't really been able to take much interest in this thread but have got some practical experience and thoughts that others may find useful.

Firstly, I've singled out one of melmerby's photos because it shows an important feature that - as far as I can see - no one else has mentioned.  When estimating the length of kadee shaft required, the inside of the knuckle needs to be just forward of the buffer line.  Look at the photo, draw a mental line between the buffers and in that photo you will see that the knuckle is just sitting forward of the line.  A picture paints a thousand words and this one shows the positioning beautifully.  This tip was taught to me when I was living in Washington and operating an American basement layout that used Kadees.

The other point I have from my experiences is Bachmann's "cranked" or "stepped" NEM couplers.  I have no idea what induced them to do this in the first place as the NEM standard is just that, a standard, and this interpretation of it is just plain wrong.  The problem is that the NEM pocket is a full 3mm higher than it should be and that means that if you try to swap an NEM Kadee into a "stepped" pocket that coupler only barely makes contact with a correctly fitted coupler. 

In the past I have simply used 3 x 0.040" plasticard strips to pack the pocket to the correct height but there is one item of stock in my fleet that this will not work with, the Bachmann 4MT Tank.  The front coupler is an in-line one and the NEM Kadee conversion is a snip.  The rear one is a stepped and can't be changed.  Neither does there seem to be room with the rear pony truck assembly to fit any other type of Kadee.

If anyone has any ideas how to fit a straight Kadee into this particular pocket I would be interested to hear, I have been experimenting with making my own NEM pockets out of Evergreen square tube and have contemplated supergluing one onto the bottom of the coupler, but that's a job for another day...

Elliott

This sounds to me like this could be an instance of using magnets that are more powerful than necessary.  It doesn't take much force to uncouple Kadees and given that (as you have realised) ferrous materials which can behave in unwanted ways in the presence of magnetic fields can be found in unexpected places on model railways, it's probably worth ensuring that uncoupling magnets, whether permanent or electrically energised, are only as powerful as they need to be to do the job required.  In the case of your electromagnets, it might be worth experimenting with fewer turns on the coil?

OK, I may have put something slightly misleading in my original post by saying that we were using coils of our own making. 

So far we've fitted up 4 uncoupling magnets, two of them use solenoids that come from Kadee's own electromagnetic uncoupling kit and the other two are our "roll your own" solenoids which are electrically identical to the Kadee ones.  The only magnetic difference will be that the official ones are wound on some sort of nylon former while ours are built around a styrene tube and sides, but I doubt the magnetic permeability of styrene is sufficiently different from the permeability of the nylon to make any discernible difference. 

However, typing this is causing the principles of magnetic theory from A Level physics 44 years ago to swirl around in my mind and I am wondering if you might have a point with the magnets (even Kadee's own coils) being too strong.   Physically, the difference above the baseboard is that instead of using Kadee's massive plates which must be 50mm + long we simply have a pair of 20mm plates sticking up vertically just inboard of the rails (very similar concept to a pair of rare earth magnets between the rails).  What is running through my mind is that in the Kadee "official" unit there is an amount of magnetic flux being pushed through the air gap on 50mm long plates, we are pushing the same amount of flux through a 20mm air gap (a 40% smaller gap).  Higher flux density, stronger (too strong) fields, that might explain some of the things we've seen.

I have spent some time during the week dismantling those wagons I can get into easily and replacing their ferrous based weights with lead and it seems to have made some difference but not as much as we had hoped - and I didn't manage to get a photograph of top side of one of our uncouplers before the layout got crated up again (layout out again this weekend).

I'll let you all know how the layout and couplings behave early next week.

If anyone who is following this will be local to Romsey this weekend do stop by and see us and the layout, Crossfield Hall, Romsey, Sat 1030 - 1700, Sunday 1000 - 1630.

Elliott

Simple answer is yes, been using rare earth magnets on our exhibition layout 'Camel Quay' (recently sold on) over a period of four years. (See post 614 and 617) All I can say is they've been 99.9% reliable on both wagons and coaches. The only mod to the wagons (mostly Bachmann) was removing the tension lock and fitting a Kadee 18 (drilled with a 2mm hole in the shank) and fitted to the existing post in the wagon making sure the height was set correctly using the Kadee height gauge. On a couple of wagons a light sponge 'brake' was fitted between the axel and body if the axels were attracted by the magnets. The coaches had NEM pockets fitted with Kadee 18.

 

(the odd 0.1% was mainly due to operator error chatting to onlookers rather than keeping an eye on the job)

Thanks for that.

Bizarrely: On my desk at this very moment a layout data sheet for Camel Quay!  I think I saw you in Sheffield about 15 months ago, you are/were in the queue for an invite to Fareham RailEx so I had better find out who the new owner is!  Could you contact him/her and pass my details on please?

Back to the couplings.  I do remember watching CQ operating and being impressed that it did work so smoothly.  If you haven't modified the wagons (i.e. changed the weights) I have no idea why we are having so much trouble with them, unless it is that the shape of the field the electromagnetic coil throws out is such that the weight effectively distorts it too far away from being truly transverse to the rails and so stopping the trip wires from throwing properly.

Our "Shed Club" group are meeting this morning and I am going to go down to the Club to mod as many of our SWB wagons as I can to have lead weights rather than iron/steel ones.

Now that I have added quite a bit of extra weight to the plastic RTR wagons AND ordered some rare earth magnets following yesterdays read of this thread, the pesky Kadee magnets worked well this afternoon while filming. However, I intend experimenting with the RE rectangular magnets when they arrive because they will not be as visible... 

 

So, I posted in this forum a couple of days ago about having a problem with what appeared to be residual magnetism in a coupler on stock on Nictun Borrud, asking if anyone had encountered a similar problem.  Having now made time to watch a number of videos in this thread - including Coachmann's - and having spent some time yesterday experimenting I can report the following:

• A pair of coaches and a locomotive always works well when uncoupling at the station.
• Short wheel base wagons always seem to be a nightmare - couplings just won't actuate.
• There is indeed a problem with residual magnetism in short wheel base wagons fitted with Kadee couplers.
• The source of this residual magnetism is actually the weight block in the floor of the wagon.
  • After a lot of faffing around last evening we removed the manufacturer's weights from the floor of a couple of wagons and everything started working as per the book

I probably ought to add that we we aren't using rare earth magnets, we're using "wind your own" electromagnets that are based electrically on the Kadee design but have much smaller surface protrusions between the rails (will post a photo when I get a chance).

Also, historically we have tried using rare earth magnets on a test bed with Kadee couplers but gave up because every time the loco uncoupled from the wagon and moved away the wagon would shoot forward and try to recouple.  If you weren't quick off the mark uncoupling just wasn't possible.

Now, Coachmann says he is intending to switch from the big Kadee magnets I can see in his video to rare earth magnets but I think he might run up against the same problem that we found on our test bed. 

So, the question for the panel is this: Is there anybody following this topic thread that is successfully using rare earth magnets to uncouple short wheel base wagons like the ones seen in Coachmann's video? And if so, what - if any - modifications did you make to the wagons to get it to work?

Thanks

Elliott

Hi All

I have been doing some "upgrading" to the Fareham Club's layout Nictun Borrud http://fareham-mrc.org.uk/layouts/nictun-borrud/ and have been experimenting with Kadee couplings in remote uncoupling mode - I have to say with some initial success.

However, we've taken the layout to the show at Arundel today, for the first time with all the goods wagons fitted up - and we've noticed something really odd happening with a couple of the pick-up goods wagons.

Problem:

Initially we thought a couple of the trip pins appear to have "retained magnetism".  

What we saw was that when two wagons came close together, just short of being close enough to couple, the trip pins were being attracted towards each other and we eventually tied it down to one particular coupling trip pin which seemed to still be magnetic some minutes after being exposed to the electromagnets.

Anyone come across this problem before?  Anyone have any ideas about how to fix it (or at least stop it happening again)?

Thanks

Elliott

Hi Guys

My local model shop has just moved into Ammo Paints by Mig Jemenez (www.migjimenez.com) as a replacement for another brand of acrylic paints that has been causing them a lot of problems. 

Talking to some "experts" on the exhibition and demonstration circuit has told me that this is a really good range of paints BUT it's colour names are all geared towards war gaming and military modelling and, as you might guess, I'm interested in railway modelling colours.

Great! Decent Paint!  However, I have a minor colour perception issue (not colour blind, the exact opposite, I'm CP1, I perceive many more colours and colour variations than the average observer would) so I find looking at colour charts and making educated guesses about which colour to use to paint, say, a 16T mineral wagon actually very difficult.

Exam question:

Does anybody know of (or have) a table of equivalent colours for the various railway livery colours we would commonly use?  Let's say fitted goods bauxite, unfitted goods grey, for early BR era and equivalent colours for the grouping era companies.

TIA

Cheers

Elliott

Hi Mike

I finally got round to stopping by this thread.  Looks good, keep us posted.

Elliott

I think a few folk @FarehamMRC might be interested as well Dave!

Elliott

 I am thinking of selling copies, as have 4 people at the club are already wanting there own.

 

Here's hoping I can escape from the demonstration zone long enough for a decent look!

Elliott

 

Anyway that's it before Southampton, if go please come and say hello.