As you all know, Atlas has reissued the Intermountain tank cars with diecast frames and their trucks and couplers. These are nice cars but the trucks re too wide for scale cars and the cars sit way too high. So, I have just undertaken a project to convert three 8,000 gallon cars and 3 11,000 gallon cars. The 8K cars are more difficult as the frame has to be modified. The 11K are a snap. You only have to mill off the mounting pins for the Atlas couplers on those cars, and drill and tap for the Kadee box. You also have to drill out the Athearn bolster as on the 8k car. They also require a mounting ring on the bolster pin.
On the 8K cars, you need to mill out the frame to accept the kadee coupler box as once you set the car at the right height, the coupler would be very low. This shows a bottom view of the mounted box after I milled about 0.050 out of the center sill and then drilled and tapped the center sill. I also had to make a bolster ring (0.060 thick) that raises the car on the Athearn truck to meet the Kadee height gauge. I had drilled out the bolster on the Athearn truck to allow it to sit on the Atlas pin. I used Atlas's truck screw after I turned down the diameter of the head.
Here is an end view with the coupler mounted. On some cars I used the Atlas air hose. On other cars, I used a cast rubber air hose.
Here is the line-up of the completed frames awaiting the bodies return.
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