I spent the day finishing the wiring and made up and installing the front coupler. I do put post war couplers on my switchers. The frame I started with had already been modified for a post war coupler. It looked like the box coupler head had been cut off and a 480-25 coupler assembly soldered on with a sheet metal spacer to get the height right. No effort had been made to put the front steps on. One of my other switchers had a nicer design so I set out to figure out how it had been made. The rivet with the centering spring around it at the rear of the coupler been removed and the right angle bracket that attaches to the locomotive was reused. This design has the advantage of leaving the box coupler in tact. The replacement coupler was a TC-11 with an extra hole drilled in it for the rivet. The TC-11 is the coupler and bracket used on the flying wing trucks.
I drilled the new hole in the TC-11 with a #17 drill. The hole was 13/32" outboard of the inside face of the verticle tab at the rear of the coupler. I used a #36 drill to drill out the rivet. This shoulder rivet Must be used somewhere else and is easy to find. I also put two small slots in the vertical tab at the rear of the coupler so the centering spring would contact both brackets at the same time. This is necessary because the new bracket is wider than the anchor bracket. This gives better centering than on the design I was copying. Prior to riveting the parts back together I throughly debured the holes and rubbed graphite into the mating surfaces. The one problem with this whole design is the washer just behind the coil rubs on the underside of the pilot beam. To correct this I put the the slightest bend in the coupler shank right at an unused hole. Then I soldered on the wire and it was ready to to. It really works well.
