Bob, I'll share what I remember but, as I mentioned, the complete "recipe" was lost when Atlas unexpectedly shut down their old forum and replaced it with new software without giving us any opportunity to archive our threads onto our hard drives. It sure would have been nice if they would have locked the old forum to new posts but given us a few days to access things. I don't care if it was a "free" service, that's just not the right way to do things. Regarding the coupler fix, as most owners of these are aware, the platform that the couplers screw into are not thick enough. Atlas apparently discovered this too late, and bandaided it by cutting the screw shorter so that it only engaged the plastic by a couple of threads at most. That is a recipe for problems. Some folks received them with the couplers already having fallen off and others had droopy couplers that invited a tightening of the screw. Unfortunately, the minimal thread engagement resulted in stripped holes more often than not. The easy fix was to just add a longer screw, which broke through the top of the end platform (functional, but not a good look). My approach was to glue an appropriately sized piece of styrene on the underside of the platform and to screw a Micro-trains underslung coupler (i.e. 2004) to it. This retains the correct coupler height, but provides a much more robust mounting without breaking through the platform. The thread I mentioned captured all of the dimensional information (size and thickness of styrene, length of screw, etc.) but was lost when the Atlas forum closed. I may still have a few photos floating around. EDIT: here's the photos that I still have:
Norseman Jack has kindly provided a solution to the problem of Atlas VO1000 couplers breaking off. The pictures are pretty much self explanatory. Norseman Jack has kindly consented to answering questions; just post them here in this thread.
