TrainDad

It has been a long road, but I’ve finally got it worked out. Here’s how it works:

1. There are two styles of cou­pler: I’m call­ing them hooks and loops. You know what I’m talk­ing about: front cou­plers that are a loop of plas­tic, and back cou­plers that a hook stick­ing up.
2. Each of those cou­plers has a ver­ti­cal flat sur­face which attach to the Geo­T­rax vehi­cle. I orig­i­nally tried to make cou­plers fit to a spe­cific model of vehi­cle, but the num­ber of designs was over­whelm­ingly com­plex; I needed a sim­pler way. I ended up find­ing that one basic design worked best, but I needed a way to attach them to a wide vari­ety of bodies.
3. The break­through came when I dis­cov­ered epoxy putty. This stuff squishes to the shape of the vehi­cle and makes a generic cou­pler fit any vehicle.

In real­ity, this tech­nique works for about three-fourths of the vehi­cles we’ve tried it on. I’ll deal with that prob­lem next.

I’m installing the e-commerce plu­gin now, and will open it up as soon as I can. At this point, my plan is to offer:

1. A basic kit. It will have an assort­ment of hooks and loops, as well as enough epoxy putty to attach them.
2. Indi­vid­ual cou­plers. They come in sev­eral col­ors: white, black, brown, yel­low, pur­ple, green, orange, red, peach, and blue.

I hope to add a mod­i­fied cou­pler set that will work for those odd vehi­cles that don’t like this design. Some day, I might also add a mount­ing guide; it’s impor­tant to get the cou­plers mounted at the right height and angle, and that would be much eas­ier if there were a tool to help.

Stay tuned. I’ll open the “store” as soon as pos­si­ble, hope­fully tomor­row (the links are active in the right menu, but you can’t see any­thing yet). I’ll have pic­tures and a com­plete instruc­tion set online too. Thanks for your patience!