SHS SW Universal Set - need ball with hole and 2 pegs

Dave,

I may have one or two spares that I can drop in an envelope.  What is the hole size and ball diameter?

Northwest Short Line has a variety of Universal Connectors:

Old Goat (contact email is in my profile)

Thanks Old Goat.  I will contact you separately, but here are the dimensions of the ball and shaft:

Ball OD = 4.6mm
Ball length (flat side to flat side) = 3.95mm
Peg length = 1.43mm
Peg OD = 1.5mm
Ball hole ID = 2.3mm

Shaft OD = 2.4mm

Thanks to those who provided me input and suggestions on this topic.   I ordered some universal joint parts from NWSL. Hopefully the horned-ball included with them for 2.4mm shafts will work. They’re on their way.   I’ll let you know.

It would be good to know. Keep us posted. Thank God for NWSL.

The horned-ball or pegged-ball from NWSL arrived yesterday and it works great (P/N 481-6).  

Thanks to help from several of you and others, these two scale ACL SHS SW9’s have been successfully converted to hi-rail wheels and AF KC’s, upgraded to LED directional lighting (instead of their original GOW bulbs), as well as enabled to run as one engine thanks to a tiny detachable four-conductor flat cable installed between them.  That allows them to leverage 16-wheel pick-up and use the reverse unit in one engine to control both at the same time.  They look and run very nicely together.  S-Helper engines are great, but their reverse units don’t stay synched very well when run as multi-units.  They tend to get out of synch and fight each other, so cabling them together helps.  [American Models reverse units for some reason are more dependable/predictable.]

PS  I realize they could be made to run with TMCC/Legacy or DCC and achieve the same or similar multi-unit results, but the owner of these engines runs their trains conventionally and requested they be set up this way.

David Horn

When looking for universals, don't forget the Hobbytown of Boston units (and clones made by MicroMark). I needed to replace the u-joints in my AM FP7 years ago (seems to me the originals were rather like the Athearn HO ball type), and it's the best running AM loco I have. I have several others, most with the spring universals, and I think I need to replace them all with Hobbytown units as well.

Bill in FtL