Although I’ve been purchasing Walthers and Rapido passenger cars for a long time I decided to keep my 1980’s production Rivarossi Budds instead of selling them. They were metalized and lightly detailed a few years ago.
I know I’m being sentimental. Although my first HO passengers cars were “Athearn Shorties”, the Rivarossi’s were the first passengers cars that I really started to tinker with and spruce up to make them look more prototypical.
I’m considering updating them with Walthers trucks. Truck adapters are now available, through Shapeways, to make installing Walthers trucks to Rivs, AHM’s, and ICH cars possible. Here is a photo of the Shapeways adapters:
My question is: Has anyone purchased and installed these adapters? If so, how do you like them? Any issues to be aware of?
What’s the purpose of the adapters? I have a couple of Rivarossi cars with non-Rivarossi trucks. I simply plugged the holes for the stock trucks and drilled new ones to mount Athearn and MDC trucks.
I can’t see the Walthers trucks being any more difficult - simply build mounting bosses using sheet styrene on the car’s underbody and similar material to plug the big hole in the Walthers truck-bolsters. Drill and tap as appropriate, and it should be suitable. I’m currently saving-up Walthers trucks to redo a number of my Rivarossi cars, which will allow me to add more weight without fear of ruining the trucks’ sideframes.
It’ll be some time before I work on mine, so I’m hoping that you’ll give us a blow-by-blow description of the process - perhaps it’s not as simple as it appears at first glance.
The Walthers passenger car trucks have a very unusual low mount with a large center hole that requires special work to get it to fit on non-Walthers passenger cars.
I bought a pair of the Walthers trucks a couple years ago for an express refrigerated boxcar. When I saw how much work would be involved, I said nope.
Ed did a magnificent job making them work underneath one of his passenger cars, but it was a lot of work.
It would be nice if these bolster adapters really work.
For me it was simply a matter of using what was at hand. I made a portion of new center sill and located the bolster center. In addition to epoxy, I also screwed the center sill piece from inside the car floor to make sure it stayed in place.
On a styrene car floor solvent cement would probably be sufficient.
Watch your minimum radius when adding to the centerbeam. I have a couple of Walthers heavyweights decorated as work train cars. They say 24" minimum radius and they mean it. Even cutting out obstructing parts of the centerbeam in order to get more range of motion in the trucks I could not get enough to traverse 22" radius. Body mounted couplers, even the double hinged ones Walthers fits, don’t help.
My Rivarossi consist tracks fine. My IHC consist gets cranky at the 22" radius sections. Both these models have quite good range of motion at the trucks and use truck mounted couplers.
I forgot to mention that (see in the photos) I installed metal wheels on my Rivarossi units on the stock trucks. Yes, the cars roll like speed skates!
(still needs body mounted couplers and end details)
But the reason I want to go wtih the Walthers trucks is because they look more realistic. Plus, from my understanding, metal needle point axles evenually hone out the plastic journals on the Riv-AHM-IHC trucks (which happened on the rear truck of one of my observation cars. It was comical seeing it wobbling vertically, one evening, at a club layout).
Walthers offers a nice selection of GSC-41 series trucks and two of the offerings more closely resemble the trucks used on the prototype ACL and SAL Budd varnish during the 1960’s.
As Kevin mentioned (thanks!), the Walthers trucks have a low-slung mount. From my understanding, the Shapeways adapters help with the issue. I’m willing to give it a try.
The Riv Budds are generic by today’s standards, and the Walthers and Rapido units are much more accurate and better detailed. However, for me it’s a lot of fun to take an inexpensive, bland looking car that some modelers would not want and spruce it up to a level that garners positive reactions.
I’m curious. To those of you that have used the Walthers adapaters mentioned above, how do you install them. Are any mods to the truck(s) and shell’s floor required?
