i am seriously thinking of buying perhaps 5 or 6 of model power’s 48 foot ho scale wood coaches and a couple of baggage cars. i want to mount kadee couplers on them by glueing the coupler boxes underneath the platforms. some say its better to have truck mounted couplers and others say its not good to have coupler boxes glued to the underframe of a passenger car. i thought glueing the boxes on would make for better operation than using truck mounted couplers. Does anyone have any of model power’s 48 foot wood coaches that have used body mounted couplers in place of truck mounted couplers?
I don’t have those, but I do have some 50-foot gondolas and flats. They work just fine with body-mount couplers. I have some much longer passenger cars that I’ve truck-mounted the couplers on, but the important thing here is car length.
It is better to have body-mounted couplers unless the cars are too long to make it around your curves that way. Body-mounts work better, particularly when backing up. 48-foot cars should make it around 18-inch radius curves with body-mounted couplers with no problem.
Body mounting a Kadee #5 should pose no problem, even with 18" radius curves. I would not ‘glue’ the coupler box on. One good ‘bump’ and I bet you will have the coupler fall off. I suspect you will need to build a styrene mounting pad and glue that to the bottom of the car. Then mount the Kadee coupler box to the pad. The thickness of the pad will be determined by how the Kadee box lines up vertically. Then use a small #2 self tapping screw, or drill/tap for a 2-56 machine screw. Now you will be able to remove the coupler for maintenence.
Jim