justakid posted:Lots of discussion. BUT... How about we ask for brass, tin, aluminum or steel castings and forget about diecast all together. With the thousands of items being made and the potential for thousands in the future, cost increase should be negligible. We keep hearing how new items are not produced using old parts. How everything is costly due to "new tooling".
How bout the mfg "new tooling" include new material. .....Hybrid,.... steel, aluminum, brass, and tin. ( all will have the desired effect of weight and metal...which is what is "required" by most hobbiests).
This is a reasonable thought or question, but there are reasons that zinc alloy castings are used versus Aluminum or brass for example. The quick comments are that both are more expensive as bulk casting materials and the zinc alloys have much lower melting temperatures and due that the casting dies do have a much longer life span and the with lower casting temps, the material provides much less shrinkage, especially compared to brass. I'd have to check but the AL and Brass may require higher injection pressures which could necessitate more costly machinery. It is all about cost here.
The other thing to keep in mind here is that honestly, as hard as it may be to recognize or accept, the actual percent of diecast parts that have or get zinc pest is a fraction of a percent of ALL the diecast components on all Lionel and or MTH trains. If you think about it, it really is a batch here and a batch there but because a single component may be run from an individual batch, the effect is every like part on a loco for example is bad, like the GG1 truck frames in the other thread.
Sorry I am babbling, but it is interesting to learn about and hopefully a better understanding might prevent someone from being either blindly worried that every train they have will self destruct or falsely comfortable that this is a perfect technology and nothing like this is possible to happen again.
