Work In Progress - N Scale Trucks with Knuckle Coupler

thingiverse

This is not yet done! After you print this you will probably find it doesn't work with the wheels and cars you have, you will need to manually edit the model until I can redo the design to work with Thingverse's customizer. These are functional N scale trucks with knuckle couplers, I used them to convert some sub-$5 rapido cars I got on eBay. They can couple with themselves and with commercial knuckle couplers, but these are a bit hard to decouple from themselves due to their single-piece design. Printing these takes about 30m and uses about $0.01 worth of plastic, but a new printer could print them faster/better if you had a lighter extrusion head. They require a bit of post-print work with flush cutters and small files. Virtually any terrible $150 to $300 printer could make these. I'm not quite done with these, I'd like to make the coupler handle tight curves better. The coupler also don't rotate relative to the trucks so they require horribly unrealistic spacing between cars which definitely doesn't look good. And to make it worse not all car bodies have the same acceptable distance between the coupler and truck mount point. These also have no aesthetic features on the sides.