More Vintage!

John R's post on (in part) bringing older models to life has made me up the priority on another post on the same thing here. He mentioned Varney cars. By the early 1960s, these were hard to find. I was being inspired in my early teens by the first published photos of Allen McClelland's V&O, and he used a lot of Varney hoppers, the prototypes of which were still very common. But in the early 60s, models of any such common cars were hard to find and, like Ulrich, expensive. McClelland had probably found his years earlier.

I finally found some second-hand Varneys at the old Troxel Brothers Models on Western Avenue in Los Angeles in the early 1970s. These were pretty dodgy. Varney was known in later years for cheap plastic that would warp (giving any plastic models, good or not, a bad rep in the 1950s). I found this out first hand. Here's one that warped, but I made lemonade out of lemons and did it as a swaybacked car using Herald King decals:

Here's another Varney with a different problem. I relettered it with dry transfers:

But notice the swelling and cracking at the center of the car, something that happened after I painted it in the 1970s. This was caused when the (cheap!) zinc alloy weight swelled and cracked:

The Germans call this Zinkpest, a very good word. I can probably salvage this car by removing the weight, crimping the swelled plastic back in place, and touching things up with paint and plastic cement. But I notice I did this before I began to understand the problems with pre-1960 or so coupler pockets. The coupler pockets here will need surgical replacement, too. No shortcuts with vintage stuff, I'm afraid!

Here's the problem with early coupler pockets. Apparently it was the introduction of the "NMRA" X2F horn-hook coupler that resulted in the coupler pocket dimension we now take for granted and first seems to have appeared on Athearn plastic cars in the late 1950s.

This Ulrich GS gon is a great model, outstanding for its day (but expensive) and certainly very good layout-quality even for now.

But as it came from the swap, it had only one coupler, an old Kadee #4. The chassis will begin to tell the story:

The old standard coupler pocket had a thin pivot post, onto which a coupler with a long slot in the shank would be installed. The slot had a spring that fit behind the center post -- the old Kadee 4s had an additional complication, in that they had a little keeper rod that went inside the spring to limit the travel of the shank. Once this was assembled, you then attached the coupler pocket cover over the center post and peened the top of the post to make it mushroom out and hold the cover on. Here's the end of the car where the old coupler fell out, which continues the story:

I believe that old Kadees, some dummies, the old Roundhouse-Devore couplers, and probably others worked this way. It was sort of a pre-standard, and it was awful, in that it was overcomplicated and fussy to assemble, and at best, it wasn't adjustable or maintainable.

Plus not everyone wanted to actually peen over the center post. I think that's what happened to this car:

The original owner installed Kadee 4s, which means it must have been post-1960 or so, but he didn't want to peen over the center post, so he just used model airplane glue to hold the coupler pocket cover on. The evidence speaks for itself. 55 years later I'm gong to have to Dremel all this off to clear out an area to install Kadee 158s with the plastic coupler box, attached with 2-56 screws. Let's hope some guy who gets this down the road in 2070 or so appreciates what I've done.

There are no shortcuts with vintage stuff! It took me a while to understand this when it was new.