TrainDad

Loop cou­pler with epoxy glue

When you pur­chase cou­plers from me, they will come in two parts: the cou­pler, and the epoxy putty glue that you will use to install it. The cou­plers have a flat back, and the epoxy putty is a blue ring with a white cir­cle in the mid­dle. Instal­la­tion is quite sim­ple, but there are a few tricks that will help you have a suc­cess­ful result.

1. Fig­ure out which side is up. The cou­plers each have a top and bot­tom. The hook is easy — it always points up. The loop is slightly harder; the top is the flat, non-angled side. To make it fool­proof, I’ve added an up-arrow to the glue side of the cou­pler. Make sure you mount it the right way.
2. Plan what you are going to do first. Epoxy putty hard­ens in about five min­utes, so you won’t have much time to fig­ure it out later. Get the train you want, and fig­ure out where the cou­pler will go. In par­tic­u­lar, see how the flat back of the cou­pler “mates” to the shape of your train. On the red engine shown above, it was very easy — the front of the engine has a nice flat plate right there. But other vehi­cles don’t play quite as nice and have strange angles or shapes to work around. In those cases, you will use the epoxy putty to fill in the space. One more thing: com­pare the height of the cou­pler with a “real” cou­pler on another vehi­cle to make sure it is exactly the same.


This is an exam­ple of a cou­pler mounted on an oddly-shaped sur­face. Notice how the cou­pler only makes con­tact on the top edge, and putty fills in the large gap below it.

3. Knead the putty. Knead it until the blue and white are com­pletely and totally mixed together, with no vis­i­ble streaks of either. It should be a smooth, even gray. This should take about one minute.


Putty squished onto the coupler.

4. Press the putty into the back of the cou­pler, then press the cou­pler onto the train. Com­pare to the height of another vehi­cle to make sure the cou­pler is posi­tioned cor­rectly. Use your fin­gers or another tool to squish the putty into the best pos­si­ble shape to hold and sup­port the coupler.


Cou­pler pressed onto the train.

5. You can trim excess putty off with a knife, if you want. Do it now, though; once the putty is cured, it will be hard as a rock. By the way, clean the knife imme­di­ately or the putty residue will adhere permanently.


Trim the putty with a knife to keep things neat.

6. Double-check place­ment by com­par­ing one more time to another vehicle.
7. Set the vehi­cle aside for a while. Don’t play with it! It takes the putty about 5 min­utes to attain a soft cure. I’d rec­om­mend let­ting the vehi­cle sit for at least 15 min­utes before play­ing with it.