hello folks due to some damaged kato couplers on some of my passenger cars i'm considering replacing them with body mounted mt couplers. does anyone of you know what mt couplers would be the best choice ? i'm thinking of using mt1015 (mostly because i recently assembled 100 pairs ....). any other ideas ? please do not post if : - you want to start a discussion about mt's slinky effect (i know how to reduce/eliminate this...) - you want to suggest using other brands of couplers please do post if : - you converted some kato passenger cars - you have some other useful hints
My suggestion is simple. Do NOT use body mount couplers if you use 11" radius track or tighter. Even with 15" radius track, it is still iffy and a chance. I just returned 3 UP heavyweight MTL Passenger cars with factory applied body mounts because they didn't make one of my curves on my all-Kato Unitrak layout. These cars are the only ones which ever failed in the past 7 years I have had this track down, and I have over 500 locos and 1500 pieces of rolling stock. I still have the shorter MTL RPO car which is beautiful, and it navigates my layout with ease and mates with other cars no matter if the other car has body mounts or truck mounts. Just a word of caution, and this was even confirmed by two of the quite experienced model railroad sellers (and highly reputed modelers) at our LHS. Ken "FloridaBoy" Willaman
1015's work just fine Sandro. I've done a bunch of Kato cars with them. If I remember correctly I used a .020 or .030 styrene tab to get the height right. BTW the antennas showed up yesterday. They look great.
Thanks for the information, guys. I haven't or do not intend to switch out Kato passenger cars because currently they are compatible with my MTL couplers on my locos or head-end cars. I use the 1015's on older Atlas and ConCor cars, and now it is on my "must buy" list whenever I shop at an LHS, because MTL conversion kits are now declining in inventory presence down here in SoFla because so many new cars are already equipped with knuckle couplers, negating the need for a MTL conversion. Whenever I see an older passenger cars retrofitted with MTL 1015's, I immediately generate self respect to the owner/seller because of the trouble, time and toil I exert assembling them. Geesh, I sure wish I had tiny hands and fingers.........and Thank God for whoever invented the Optivisor. Ken "FloridaBoy" Willaman
Hi, I have them on both ends of several of my Kato Business cars and they are fine. I to have nice large radii to run on my layout. In a few cases for even closer coupling I did use a short body mount Unimate. In retrospect, I like the 1015 better for this application.
i had a coupler of mt 2003 couplers laying around. used a 1mm thick piece of black styrene. built a drilling jig from brass. now i can easily drill a hole for the screw in the right position. they couple a tad closer than with the original kato couplers. also the 2003 finally were good for something. thanks for all your suggestions. grant, let me know if you need more sinclairs.
