EggHaulers

A cute little car, developed 7 years ago (from 2019) to compliment the then Aristo Eggliner, and currently the Bachmann made version.

I've had an eggliner for some time, but finally catching up to my projects and wanted a couple of cars to go with it.

The one below has an insert that raises the inside

In the above picture, it's fairly obvious that these are printed with a 3d filament printer and not super high resolution. But to offer at a reasonable price, this is the way it is.

In the picture below, you can see the sideframes are printed. You can also see the proper outline for a Kadee 830/906 coupler box, the standard for rolling stock. More about couplers later.

Let's look at wheels: The design has to have pretty wide-spread sideframes. These are Aristo standard wheels. You can see that the face of the lower wheel is contacting the sideframe. While this probably won't cause any issues, I wanted some clearance, and the excessive side to side play is not necessary.

 So I went to my friendly Ace Hardware, and bought some 4mm nylon washers. A couple on each axle tip solves this issue and still leaves plenty of side to side play:

Now on to couplers. As you can clearly see in the pictures above, the standard and unique footprint for the standard Kadee "slack action" coupler for freight is printed in the base. But when I bolted one on, to my chagrin, the coupler height was way off. Now, operationally, with such a short car, this will not cause overriding issues with the couplers.

But, I tend to try to make all this stuff perfect, and of course the coupler pin is now too low and the pin will need to be bent up to have proper clearance. Anyone that has used Kadees knows the sickening "thunk" when a low hanging coupler pin catches the rails in a switch and everything comes to a halt. Since I use the uncoupling features of the Kadees, this was not acceptable to me.

What to do? Since the coupler box needs to go higher, trimming the underside is not acceptable unless you want to mill a slot in the base and glue the coupler on. Gluing to these 2 very different types of plastic is problematic, and I searched for an easy solution, especially for people that want to just bolt them on, and also keep in mind if you have younger engineers, you want these mounts to be sturdy when cars are crashing into each other.

I found that if I did not use the top lid of the draft gearbox, the height was better. So by sanding the 3 lugs of the gearbox flush, I could mount the coupler. Because there is no top lid, I needed the coupler to not drop down into the rest of the printed base, i.e. the edges and center boss are higher.

So, by adding 2 shims about the thickness of the center mounting boss, the coupler was controlled. Below you can see the 2 shims. This allowed using standard Kadee self tapping screws at all 3 locations and a secure mounting without glue.

Now, that is much better: Standard Kadee couplers at the standard height!