Jim, I don't care about diecast or plastic steamers. None of my main arguments are about zinc used in that application. You are hung up on the steamer thing, not me. I only brought it up because some people feel like a plastic steamer is not right in O gauge. That stems primarily from a sentimental point of view and not necessarily from a logical perspective as someone has already mentioned.
The items we deal with that suffer from pest the most are the detail items like fuel tanks, trucks, sideframes, pilots, couplers, smoke units, etc. This is the area where zinc is causing the most problems. This is the area where plastic would outperform zinc and eliminate a lot of the problems we are dealing with. I personally have had zinc parts in all of the categories I just mentioned fail due to pest. With the exception of the smoke units, plastic would adequately replace all of the aforementioned parts.
You are clearly reading way too much into my posts if you think that I want all zinc eliminated from our products. I only want it eliminated if it can't or won't be produced properly in China. I am in no way advocating for zinc to be completely replaced by plastic because I feel plastic is superior to zinc. I want to see plastic replace zinc in many of the parts on our trains because zinc isn't being produced properly and I feel plastic would be far less problematic in the applications where we are seeing failing zinc parts.
None of the N scale items I own have zinc pest issues. But I have had quite a few issues with it in O gauge and therein lies the issue. That is what this whole thread is about, not diecast vs plastic steamers, not plasticizers, and not N scale. Those things were only brought up as points of discussion to show that similar parts made in plastic aren't failing due to material defect.
I am not trying to sell a problem. It has already been sold and we bought it. I want to see it go away. If that means plastic then so be it. You can't seem to handle that solution and apparently are content to continue to throw your money away on products with defects rather than have another material that can perform the job satisfactorily. I would rather buy a product and have it last longer than me.
I personally don't care about the materials that go into our trains as long as the end result is a quality product, free from defects, that performs the task it was designed for and lasts a long time. Since we aren't getting that with zinc, that is why I am an advocate for plastic to replace it. I don't see that as being unreasonable. I'll bet the OP and many others with hundreds or thousands of dollars tied up in trains that are worthless and unusable to due zinc pest would agree.
I have read about plasticizer migration and how it effects plastics and materials in contact with those chemicals. I only mentioned the outdoor plastics because that was the example used by a fellow forumite in his response. It is not really that much of an issue with many of the plastics we use in our hobbies.
