Prepared by Steve Luck Originator GrahamClark

GrahamClark - Apr 13, 2018
Fitting the Kadees was more complex. The plastic buffer beam had to be cut away to miss the draft box, but leave enough of its fixing tabs to be able to screw it back on. The diecast chassis then had to be cut away at the front around the coupling to give space for the draft box. I started by trying to saw and file it, then gave up and bit the bullet and completely dismantled the chassis and took the diecast block to the vertical mill and milled it out. While in the mill, I also drilled and tapped holes for an M2 fixing screw. It wasn't the most straightforward coupling conversion!

Foster22566 - Jun 17, 2018
As I suffer from a slight hand shake and I can't fit these together with other types of fittings I would be very interested in the details of the fitting of the Kadees as I need to covert my locos and stock.

GrahamClark - Jun 18, 2018
The Kadee fitting was not easy. I had to strip the loco down completely until I just had the die cast chassis block. This has a slot where the existing coupling tail fits, but it wasn't wide enough for the Kadee draft box. I mounted the chassis block in the vertical mill and milled a ½“ wide slot out of the die cast. While set up in the mill, I also drilled a hole and tapped it M2 for a bolt to hold the coupler in.

It was much easier to fit Kadees to the Heljan 20 as that has a plastic arm that the couplers fit to and it was simple to bolt the draft box to that. I haven't got any other Heljan locos, so I don't know about them. The Dapol 08 was easy though, as that was built with Kadees in mind.