It’s been a busy time over the last few weeks, which you may have noticed by my absence last week.  But I’ve not been idle and I have lots of new things on the way, but for now they are still on the drawing board or being tested.

One thing I can share with you is a new design for a fellow UK OO gauge modeller who is fitting Kadee couplers to his rolling-stock.  He wanted to have a non-functioning Kadee coupler to make sure that rolling-stock in fixed rakes would not come uncoupled but maintain the look of the Kadee coupler.  As most of the new OO gauge rolling stock now has NEM standard sockets it seemed that this would be fairly simple.

A working Kadee coupler with a NEM fitting, as shown below, rotates about a central pin and the knuckle opens and is held closed by the spring on the side.

I designed the dummy so that it’s fixed in the closed position.  I also omitted the rotating pin and made the whole coupling one piece.  Hopefully there’ll be enough play in the knuckle to allow for some rotation.  My first design looks like this.

This is now being test printed and as usual I will share the results with you once they arrive and I’ve had a chance to test them.

But for now it’s back to the drawing board.