I've been replacing couplers on my engines and cars with Kadee #158 whiskers over the last few days while I convalesce from some minor surgery on a cyst (excised) on my back (going to take several more weeks before it can be closed up again). Most couplers have been straight forward (fiddly as usual for some) until I came to do the Athearn RTR 60' Gunderson high cube box cars this evening (latest release ones).
These are very fiddly and because there are no screws in the coupler boxes (only the trucks) and the coupler box lid is clamped between the underframe and the car body, there are only 2 ways far as I can see to get them apart. To make things a bit more difficult there are brake "rods" resting against the underside of the inner axle, but also at each end the coupler cut bars, which are fixed. glued?) to a bracket on the corner/s of the car body, the thin end of which rests against the underside of the coupler box, more or less, trapping it in position.
My first 2 attempts I loosened the truck screws to allow the ends of the underbody bracing (which the coupler box is a part of) to lift up enough to get the lid off and the plastic coupler out. But they haven't made this easy either. The peg the coupler pivots on is part of this main bracing and the cover has a small peg which is a press fit into that pivot. I managed to do the 2 cars this way while trying not to break those cut bars which you can't lever out of the way, no way. Getting the new couplers in was an exercise for the fingers and tongue.
That was last night, tonight I tried the second modus operandi. Decided to lift the entire underbody frame etc off the car 'cause that would mean I could get at the covers and remove/refit more easily. Succeeded in "pinging" one of the cut bars into the stratosphere, but luckily it re-entered and parachuted down a couple of feet away on my bench (amazing I found it it's so tiny). Thinking I had it all free I tried to lift the frame clear, only to find the brake valve (on the end of a couple of flimsy "pipes") had to be levered out of its socket in the body.... Yes, it was certainly easier to change the couplers that way and the G/box cover does press into the pivot quite firmly. But with all the brake "rods" and fittings along the bottom of the frame and it not being a very solid structure, I'm not sure if one of those rods got snapped by me or someone in the factory and I just noticed it when I finished. (most likely me, but I don't want to take all the glory)
. BTW: Nice job on your flour mill complex.
