Anyone ever ordered from them ? Looking at their items; they look good and are reasonably priced.
The only thing I have bought from them are there small houses. One of my towns is going to be one of those Levitown type communities that sprang up in the post WWII building boom. These houses are the closest thing on the market to that type of cookie cutter home.
I’ve ordered from them before. Good products, good prices. I had a couple technical questions about their twin-coil switch machines, so I emailed them, and got everything I needed. Rick Rideout is a nice guy who runs a good business. I recommend them.
Ray
Rix also makes Pikstuff and Smalltown USA structures. Good quality and inexpensive.
Nick
I too recomend their kits, I have several and they are fun to build. And the customer service is great, ask them a question about their products and you usually get a great answer that is very informative.
Noah
I like their structure kits, and the RixRailer. The railer will save enough time to pay for itself the first time you use it.
Greg
I haven’t purchase directly, but I have a Rail-it and one of his uncoupling sticks with the two magnets and a handle. I wouldn;t attempt to duplicate the Rail-it out of plastic pieces, the uncoupler I could make myself using styrene strips but it would cost more to do it myself. Both products work great.
–Randy
I’ve purchased several Rix items. Very satisfied with the quality.[tup]
I have one of their uncouplers - works suprisingly well when you get the hang of it though I’d probably buy one of the Kadee hand uncouplers next time. Quality was ok - managed to break the handle but it glued back on easily enough and it doesn’t feel overly weak.
Rick is a class act guy who cares a great deal about what he puts out has well as the hobby has a whole.
He has a very nice L&N layout, too. Been a while since it’s been in the magazines (hint, hint)
I’ve found the uncoupler tool, like skewers, works best with real Kadee couplers - another reason I regularly repalce the knock-off types with the real thing.
–Randy
He makes a very clever product that everyone i show it to says “of course! That’s the way to do it.” I refer to telegraph or telephone pole crossbars with insulators (he also makes the poles, cast in brown plastic).
To get the appearance of green “coke bottle” glass insulators, people have toyed with using metallic paint for the insulators, or glass beads, but it never looks really great.
Rix had the idea of casting the entire cross bar and insulator in green clear plastic, so that you paint only the wood parts and leave the insulators as is. The result is amazingly realistic insulators. I would not known of this product but for a clinic by the late Soo Line modeler John Proebsting
Dave Nelson
Good products, great service.
I have several of the Rix uncouplers stashed about my layout. I think they work great.
I’ve recently been kitbashing a highway overpass. It works great because the parts are ‘modular’ and easily adaptable to non-standard situations – like making the overpass run up a gentle slope and arranging the concrete supports on an angle.
One problem, from one kit some parts were missing. I had to improvise by buying some sheet styrene.
I just purchased a Rix house (one of those clap board houses with the brick porch that were popular after WWII) and it was a nice model, I built it this weekend and have to weather it…it was a fairly easy kit to construct but the plastic is thin so if you want to light the house you may want to paint the walls on the inside of the house so that the entire house doesn’t “glow” when the light in the house is on…chuck