Coupling Tweezers

Getting fiddly coupling chains attached to coupling horns on skips can be a challenge. Just making up a train of 4 skips can be a project in itself. It was so in my old scale of 1/35 and it still is in 1/19 scale. Recently I have been greatly assisted by a commercial product, however. 

Tools and materials bought at the DMJU national exhibition in April.

When I visited the Danish Modelling Railway Union's exhibition in April, I bought a selection of tools and materials as well as some books. Building a small Danish industrial narrow gauge layout in a large scale leaves me with very little off the shelf to choose from, but now and then something very useful shows up. 

A first time acquisition for me at the exhibition was a set of coupling tweezers. Until now I have used a wooden toothpick, a piece of wire or a set of ordinary tweezers. Not always with the best results,, but good enough not to annoy me sufficiently enough to do something about it. With the light Hudson underground skips recently coming into service something a little more advanced was required to allow relatively safe coupling and uncoupling. A set of specially adapted tweezers from Forhmann Werkzeuge now serves me when coupling chain link coupled rolling stock. The tweezers are about 150 mm in length and made from stainless steel. Their bent shape allows then to reach between skips standing almost buffer to buffer. The shape also means thire movement to open and close the tweezers is up and down, limiting the risk of separating the stock one tries to couple.

Fohrmann image of the coupling tweezer in action. One of the rare images of a standard gauge model on my blog. 

I shopped at the stand of Epokemodeller that has a good selection of what the demanding enthusiast need for the workshop - and if you model in smaller scales than me, a lot of other usefull things are available.

At the DMJU exhibition I also found some railway books that I missed in my collection. Most of them on light standard gauge railways. Some will note them being in three different languages. I have railway litterature in a multitude of languages from English, Dutch and German over Russian and Czech to Spanish and Estonian. Having knowledge of the main Scandinavian languages (except Finnish), German, English and Russian most of the books makes some kind of sense to me. The Estonian ones are still Greek to me, though.

Books in Danish, Swedish and German.