I have several sets of IHC smoothside and rib side passenger cars with long shank couplers (both horn hook and McHenry) and am not able to get them to stay coupled. Because of the long shanks attached to the trucks, they float greatly up and down over any slight irregularities in track work and they slip up over each other and become un-coupled.
Would mounting shorter shank couplers on the bodies be a possibility?
Thanks for any help.
It has a lot to do with your track radius. IHC passenger cars have lots of overhang on tight
radius curves. If you are under about 30" radius, I wouldn’t try body mounted couplers.
I had pretty good luck with Kadee’s close coupling conversion kits. They are still truck
mounted, but they bring the cars closer together and take up the slack. Buy one kit
and try it(about 3 bucks if I remember correctly). Good luck. Dave
I added weight to mine to bring them up to NMRA weight and this made a big difference. I use the McHenry couplers as well.
Simon, I twice tried to “quote” you and got a Mirocsoft error message and had to reacces the whole web site, so I’m just saying, I had the same experience.
Rickk, I still have a few cars that give me some trouble. Although they are the same “make”, the coupler seems to ride lower on them. I need to see if McHenry carries any overmounted (or is it undermounted - they always seem to call it opposite of how I think it). You know what I mean, however.
I and other club members have both heavyweight and streamline IHC passenger car sets. We have changed to body-mounted Kadee couplers on all of them by using the JayBee coupler mounting pads, put InterMountain 36-inch wheelsets on them, and added weight in the interior cavities using lead shot. Some of us have also put the interiors into them, which helps add a little more weight.
Some of the McHenry replacement couplers don’t have actual springs in the knuckles, but use the small plastic finger. These couplers are notorious for coming uncoupled on curves and downgrades, so you need to change to ones with real metal springs if you have this type. The newer McHenry couplers have springs, if you don’t want to go to the extremes we have.
I don’t like the McHenry’s. I’ve had problems with the knuckles jamming up when the molded-in spring gets caught. It makes me want to give the car the finger [:D] When that happens, a proper Kadee is the only answer.
Kadee makes a conversion kit that fits right onto the IHC/Rivarossi truck. Be aware that changing out the wheelsets throws the coupler’s height off.