Good morning everyone & please excuse me if I posted this post under the wrong heading. I was undecided if it belonged in the electronics section or here.
Recently I bought 300 Intermountain 33" wheelsets in boxes of 100 from an online supplier that had a DEEP BRONZE COLOR to them that easily scratched off with the side of a Dremel cutoff disc. Last week at a flea market I picked up 2-12 packs of Intermountain 33" wheelsets but these had a BLACKISH SILVER TINT to them. The 300 came in plain brown boxes of 100 with each box containing 10 packages of 10 with the words made in China on them. The boxes did NOT contain the word Intermountain on them & just had a plain white label that said W40055 HO scale 33" bulk wheelsets. Questions?
Do you think I got knockoffs?
What is the differrence between semi-scale scale wheelsets (1 of the 12 packs had this on the package) & the other 12 pack package which had 33"wheels on it ?
WOW,hope your wrong cause I have the same box with the same part # and the wheels are in 10pk clear bags, but I’ve had em over a year and they seam to do the job .
mite want to go to the intermoutain site an see if there is a order page for parts ect ,or do a search of the part # on there site…Jerry
Color of the base metal and blackener can change with different production. Intermountain may have been affected by a supply disruption in China like other manufacturers and the appearance of their wheels may have changed somewhat as a result. The current wheelsets from Atlas and Walthers, for example, have changed in shape and otherwise from those of their previous supplier (they used to have an unrealistic flat wheel face and now have a more realistic profile). The boxes my LHS has of Intermountain wheels are plain brown, with 100 per box and 10 per package, and have been for years. Sounds like yours are the same in that regard.
“Semi scale” Intermountain wheels have “code 88” tread width as opposed to the more typical code 110 (referring to the width in thousandths of an inch). If you have track that’s in gauge the narrower wheels should operate fine. You may have problems with Atlas code 100 and curved Walthers code 83 turnouts which can be badly wide in gauge at the points, so much so that code 88 wheels can drop off the rails.
well did a quick look on the Intermountain site ,and under accessories I found the wheels ,no picts though, but the # and description match …Im good. Jerry
It is possible that you got wheelsets made by copy cat company, very very common in internet sales. I work with Chinese mfgs in my business. It can get so bad that they rip each other off.
However, iIn this case it is possible that you bought some wheels that were rejected by Intermountain QC dept. The mfg didn’t want to eat the wheels and so dumped them on the internet–happens ALL the time. It would be unfair to Intermountain to refer to them as Intermountain wheels. In mfg we are very careful to have QC traceability when we put our brand/name on things in this country.
Before all the other IM, P2K and Kadee wheelsets, our club would buy bulk bags of JB wheelsets. The anodised coloring always was different on the bulk as compared to dozen packs (from deep weathered black to almost bronze). Who knows, maybe the bulk ones are done on a different line. Never had any issue w/ any of them. Quite a few times I would polish the tread to the nickle removing the anodised. I paint the wheelsets and weather, so it never mattered what coloring they started as.