The other bit of irony may be that BB trucks (and Accurail) fit P2K or Intermountian wheels just fine. They don’t need custom axle lengths. So even if you DID want semi-scale tread widths, you can just use the standard Intermountain ones. And it’s the BB and Accurail cars that make up a large majority of my fleet, so I use a LOT of wheelsets.
I have about 1000 freight cars, most with Intermountain code 110 wheel sets in Kadee metal sprung trucks…
I don’t need Reboxx to define “quality” for me, I have my own views on the subject.
After being self employed most of my life, the one lesson I learned about customers is “don’t try to sell a red Chevy to a man who asks for a blue Ford”.
Not that I care much about scale wheels, I think the point was made that Reboxx was trading improved quality in one area for less quality in another area, gap between the wheel and sideframe. Overall quality is the same, not really advanced.
Maybe if Reboxx could team with a producer who could eliminate the sideframe gap, then their business model may be more lucrative than the after market product.
While there is a vocal constituency kits fans, it does appear from what has been produced over the past 10 years that there has been a paradigm shift in sales of rolling stock over to the RTR; logically that would remove a great deal of demand for replacement wheel sets, and specialty wheelsets would probably suffer the most, such as Reboxx. I have been building kits but so far I haven’t found I must buy wheel sets other than what I have been from Intermountain and others.
If the demand isn’t there, it may not even be worth another company buying their product line and offering it as an addition.
Agreed, I have lots if kits, more yet to build, and lots of RTR. I do replace trucks and wheel sets on a lot of RTR, because of my preference for sprung trucks. And I have bought a lot of Intermountain wheel sets and Kadee trucks.
Reboxx simply lost any shot at my business by not offering code 110 wheels.
But again, the current product offerings make their product less relevant.
I don’t know much about scale wheels. It seems that part of their issue is the differeing axle lengths not mating with every truck, due to variances in those between mfgs.
Agreed, the wheelset that are installed in RTR products seem to be universally accepted and their isn’t as much demand to replace them with an aftermarket product as before.
To the narrow issue of gap, I assume mfgs design the ends of their cars to accomodate the unprototypically wide wheels that are common installations when produced, so the consumer seems happy enough.
I haven’t paid enough attention to know that Reboxx only did semi-scale code 88 wheels (or whatever the proper designation is). I bought the sample pack in case I really needed a particular axle length without regard to 110 vs 88 code.
If they only did semi-scale wheels, then that would limit their customer base further.
Anyway, if they are going out of business, it’s all moot.
Agreed. When it comes to wheels, the most important thing to me is that they are not bright silver.
Free rolling doesn’t matter when you pull 7 car trains and spot a car on a slight grade, and the clickity clack just forces me to turn up the sound on the loco.
I’m wondering if the proprietors have experienced a sudden medical emergency or simply passed away. Several scenarios like that have affected small-time businesses and if the principals do not leave an exit strategy or at least have a friend or family member informed as to how to handle closing the business, well, everyone is left holding the bag.
A similar thing happens to people that have various railroad or modeling web sites and if they are suddenly or unexpectedly disabled or die , the survivors are unaware or not instructed to post a “Gee, we’re sorry but the owner is dead so we can’t get to the phone or keyboard right now…” message.
Yes, small businesses close for all sorts of reasons, no telling what happened here.
I only know one modeler who started converting a lot of stuff with Reboxx wheelsets. Then he noticed the rougher ride thru his turnouts, and stopped converting to semi scale wheels…
The whole idea of semi-scale wheelsets was a compromise in the first place, no matter who makes them. The idea was they would look a bit better than the overly wide code 1110 wheels wjile still negotiating trackwork made for the code 110 RP25 wheels. Which they do - mostly. Probably reliable enough not to derail, but the narrower wheels can drop in the frogs of otherwise NMRA compliant turnouts because of the tolerance range that is allowed by the standards. So you get bouncing you don’t get through the very same turnout with code 110 wheels. That may or may not be acceptable to you - I’m not a fan. I guess if I wanted to build a model where I could take a closeup high res photo from the end and not have it be obvious it was a model, I’d build it with finescale wheels. Probably be a shelf queen though, I really have no desire (or time) to build a large layout to strict finescale tolerances. I will admit - such a thing does look great - no matter what the scale. Even N scale looks quite nice with code 40 rail laid to fine scale standards with fine scale wheels on the cars. More power to those who do it - it looks awesome. But, it’s just not my thing.
I suspect also that the other side (ooriginal side?) of Reboxx, that being making repalcement boxes for brass, is also a somewhat limited market - there are after all only so many older brass locos that exist, and once they have new boooxes - how often do you need to get ANOTHER new box for the same loco?
I do believe the proprietor of Reboxx is significantly older than I am, and as more or less a one man band, things happen. Thing I am going to carefully hold on to is my truck tuner tool - the Micro Mark one is next to useless compared to the one Reboxx sold. It’s WAY too short.
As far as I know, the 88 bounce is from the wheel dropping as it crosses the frog gap. Manufacturers make the flangeway as deep as possible, so that they don’t have to hear people complaining about how their Dad’s Rivarossi Dockside bounces UP. As opposed to the 88’s dropping DOWN.
So, on my #10 Shinora, some of my cars bounce.
I’m doing a project that will use four #20 track switches. I am currently building the frogs. I think maybe even 110 wheels will want to drop in that size frog. My plan is to have the flangeway be about the depth of the flange, so that the wheels will roll through the frog gap on their flanges. That will either be .035", to allow for old NMRA S-4 flanges, or it might be .028", and let the S-4’s bounce UP. I will not be running any flanges deeper than S-4.
The next project after that will need the building of about 10 track switches, of varying size. I do believe I will keep the #20 flangeway depth for those, too.
Because I do have and like the 88 wheels. And I don’t like the bounce.
I like to build kit freight cars, from BB to Accurail to Proto 2000, etc., and add Kadee couplers and metal wheelsets.
When I got started, I bought a digital caliper and measured the (conical end) axle end length of the original to understand that vs. the 33" Intermountain and/or Proto (ribbed back for older cars) wheelsets I might install. I did some downhill rolling tests, and found that matching the axle lengths to the Reboxx recommended length items was not necessary. As long as the replacement axle is not excessively long or unreasonably short, it ran fine (much better than original plastic wheelsets). So I did not get into ordering Reboxx recommended wheelsets (did they not offer code 110?) for particular cars per their lists because they were the “right” length.
I never considered the code 88 items, thanks to understanding the issues via this forum.
Well, here it is over a year later and still no word on what ever happened to REBOXX. I would hope that another company or manufaturer whould pick up the tooling and resume offering the wheelsets. I still see the need for shorter axle lengths of .950 and longer ones of 1.200.
On some Atlas trucks, I have had to drill into the journals to get Intermountain wheelsets to fit and roll freely. On some Walthers trucks, the Intermountain wheelsets fit sloppy, thus the need for longer axles.
I have used both 88 and 110 Intermountains on most if not all trucks; they fit Tahoe correctly, but some trucks required tuning.
Maybe not for Walther trucks. I always disliked their six-wheel metal-sideframe trucks on earlier heavyweight passenger cars because it was hard to get them to free-roll. My solution was to buy Branchline truck kits, an easy replacement and very free-rolling.
I heard that Reboxx and Intermountain came from the same plant; not true?