I bought two sets of A-B units for an A-B-B-A set and am painting them up in C&O colors. Any ideas on how to close couple these precious marvels?
I would suggest a combination of MT couplers and American Limited working diaphramsfor E and F units.
Caboose Hobbies (Red Caboose - Unimates), makes a short, medium and long shank dummy coupler that works well to shorten the distance between Kato's, InterMountain's, or Bachmann's F Units. Downside you loose the auto coupling, upside they won't come apart. You have to couple them by hand.
The Red Caboose "Uni-Mates" work pretty well and need just some slight tweaking to fit the coupler pocket between units. They made the same couplers I used on my Intermountain F's to close the distance. The S.
Another thumbs up for the Uni-Mates,but use the coupler pockets for the B-Mann MTL couplers,they drop right in then,and stay aligned better.
Well if you want then real close.....Use a piece of styrene about 9/16s inches long and aprox. 1/8th inch wide. drill a hole close to each end. Then insert them into the stock coupler boxes. I've used this on Lifelike c liners and get a real nice scale coupling distance. May have to modify it for Bachmann though. Best thing is that it costs next to nothing......mike
Bachmann F7s with unimates installed. Painted in late C&O freight colors. WARNING!: If running four Bachmann F7s in a group like this you should wear hearing protection! Wow! Are they loud!
Nice! This is the paint scheme that I saw the most of on F7's going through Garrett, Indiana back in the 1970's.
That's one awesome four some. Looking mighty fine. I had to put ear muffs on all the way over here in Big Bear. Heck those things are noisy. Darn, can't you quiet those things down....grin!
All that growling makes them sound powerful. But even four of them dont pull as well as Intermountain or Kato F7s. And you dont need earplugs with those!
Rick, If you look through my albums you'll see: 1. Close-coupled with Uni-mates 2. Close-coupled with drawbars 3. Close-coupled DCC with drawbars All were retired with the IM F-3s, which are close-coupled with Unimates. And Sharknoses with the same couplers.
