I was reading the ‘Couplers’ thread and it brought to mind the day I was going to replace the ‘stock’ coupler on the tender of my Bachmann Spectrum consolidation with a Kadee. I came across this on the Kadee website.
"
TENDER:Invert the tender and place in a padded cradle and remove the
existing coupler. It is not necessary to remove the truck, however, if you do
the nut from the truck screw will be loose inside of the tender and you will need
to remove the body to retrieve the nut and reattach the truck, make sure the
electrical pickup wire is reattached also. Assemble the #33 coupler with the
Someone from Bachmann’s G scale side must have worked on the design for that one (many of their G scale locos have the coupler at like railhead height - whoever thought that was a good design should have been hauled out back and shot). SOmetimes you have to watch the Kadee instructions too, there seem to be a lot of old ones still posted where a newer model coupler would be easier than some of the older designs, those 30 series with the torsion spring are neat but finicky with a lot of parts. If the stock coupler is a McHenry with a center shank then almost certainly there’s a different Kadee than the 33 which will drop in with little or no effort.
Thanks for the info on taking Kadee instructions with a grain of salt. I did not know that, nor had I tried the number 30 coupler. After reading the instructions on the Kadee website, I… huh… went on to other problems on my railroad with the idea of tackling the tender coupler another day.
I was reading the ‘Couplers’ thread and it brought to mind the day I was going to replace the ‘stock’ coupler on the tender of my Bachmann Spectrum consolidation with a Kadee. I came across this on the Kadee website.
"
TENDER:Invert the tender and place in a padded cradle and remove the
existing coupler. It is not necessary to remove the truck, however, if you do
the nut from the truck screw will be loose inside of the tender and you will need
to remove the body to retrieve the nut and reattach the truck, make sure the
electrical pickup wire is reattached also. Assemble the #33 coupler with the
I was reading the ‘Couplers’ thread and it brought to mind the day I was going to replace the ‘stock’ coupler on the tender of my Bachmann Spectrum consolidation with a Kadee. I came across this on the Kadee website.
"
TENDER:Invert the tender and place in a padded cradle and remove the
existing coupler. It is not necessary to remove the truck, however, if you do
the nut from the truck screw will be loose inside of the tender and you will need
to remove the body to retrieve the nut and reattach the truck, make sure the
All you have to do, Jarrell, is pull off the draft gear box lid, and drop in a #5 and spring, or a #148 whisker, (or 58, 136, 158, etc.,) and screw the lid back on. The pilot is a bit trickier, but the same sort of thing goes on there. Pull the clip for the original coupler, put the new coupler in and shove the clip back into place. I’ve done 3 of them, plus a 4-8-2, and am getting ready to do another 4-8-2 and a 4-6-0. I do not anticipate any problems. Contact me offline, and I’ll be happy to send pictures…
The last Spectrum 2-8-0 I did used a whisker in the tender. I used a 148, 158 would work as well.
The front end has a scale head McHenry, as the slot is not big enough to place a whisker without filing either the slot or the coupler. Comes out at the proper height both ends.
Thanks Gary… that’s just what I did. No problem. Looking back at Kadee’s web site I see those instructions were from back in 2004. Evidently Bachmann retooled the tender since then, I don’t know. I see though from some responses in this thread that I have to break my bad habit of going to their website to see what Kadee recommends. I normally don’t do that, especially with most rolling stock. A number 5 is usually the answer.