The rusty brown color of castings supplied in Sergent Engineering coupler kits will be phased out and replaced with black castings. As many customers have noticed, the exact flavor of rusty brown has been somewhat inconsistent over the years. This is due to an inherent difficultly in repeating the coloring process exactly every time. This particular problem will go away once the castings are supplied in black. Unfortunately, the casting will all be black. The process needed to obtain the black finish is safer and more environmentally friendly than the process that created the rusty brown finish. In fact, our plating house has now refused to provide the rusty brown finish because of these issues. Assembled couplers will still be provided in the rusty brown color, but the color will be obtained through the use of paint rather than a chemically applied metal surface treatment.
Painting the casting provided with the kits is not difficult and highly recommended. Remember, prototype couplers are not black. Step by step instructions will be provided in the coming days that detail this operation and also provides some tips for creating even better looking couplers.
Many customers have noticed that although our investment cast products are listed as "Stock Items" they are not always in stock. Recently, this issue has been more serious as we are and have been for some time experiencing manufacturing problems with items made by that process. Please understand that we are trying to work through these problems and expect to have significantly more higher volume production capability when these come back on line. These problems have also delayed introduction of new products such as the type H coupler.
Technology used to manufacture our investment cast items is state of the art. Sergent Engineering uses high speed 3D printers to produce parts one at a time. This allows us to provide a wide variety of variations of the product that simply would not be financially plausible with other manufacturing technologies due to tooling cost. This has also allowed us to quickly produce some special products for customers' unique circumstances. While some other companies have used similar technology to produce master patterns for soft tooling, Sergent Engineering is probably the only model railroad company to use the technology on a production basis. Perhaps we now understand why this technology is rarely used on a production basis.
This technology works great when it works. However when troubles arise, causes of problems are not typically simple to identify and correct. This is where we are today. Stock levels on investment cast products are dwindling and production capabilities for replacements are offline. We will not give up on this technology because the products that it makes available would be non existent otherwise. We also have several new designs that are just waiting for the printers to come back on line. Please watch this space for updates that will be provided when available.
We do appreciate your patience and ask that you bear with us a while longer while we continue to address the issue.
Update January 2012
While we continue to work to find a solution to the problems in manufacturing the investment cast products, we are also in the process of moving some castings to a die cast process instead. This will lessen the manufacturing load for the equipment and allow the printers to be used only for the really special products. This is not a quick or easy solution, but will be worth it in the long run.
Some folks have asked a reasonable question: How do I know which products are diecast and which products are investment cast? The answer to this is easy. Any of the EC87 and EN87 products are diecast. The rest of the coupler products (shelf coupler, tightlocks, etc) are investment cast.