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Helm
Little Six
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 Posted - January 08 2010 : 4:18:47 PM
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I've collected tyco cabeese (cabooses?) for about seven years. After all that time and about 60 cabooses, I still keep finding new variations. What's the deal with TYCO? It seems like they never made a run of product the same way twice.
I had the top two Penn Central cabosses. Then I came across the bottow one the "PC" marking higher. The "PC 4751" looks like a different font too. I guess they made a new stamp/stencil to letter this run.
 
Keeps it exciting. You never know what you'll find
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Posted - January 08 2010 : 4:53:07 PM
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Interesting. Welcome to the forum.
Alco Fan
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Posted - January 08 2010 : 9:25:46 PM
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I have several dozen cabeese two, including the top two PC's you show. And I know there's several more I don't have. The caboose underwent so many changes and revisions, more so than any other car, it's nothing short of amazing...
As to your variants. In my opinion the font did not change, so much as the registration of the top caboose is really far superior to the other two. In other words, they stamped it straight and held it there for a nice solid print... and then just gave quick pokes on the other two. Notice how the edges of the lettering are where the differences are: this is a classic telltale of a quick (poor) application process. You know exactly how it works if you've ever played with a rubber stamp...
As for the logo size... would be interesting to measure but it's hard to tell. They may be the same... the giveaway is the topmost example has the right edge of the logo printed on the rivets. The other two do not, but the left edge is moved over more to were IT is on the rivets.
The location is an interesting variant... you'll find lots of this type of thing on several Tyco cars, not just Cabeese.
As you can tell, I'm the "OCD" collector around here... anyway thanks for sharing and welcome aboard!
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Posted - January 10 2010 : 1:18:59 PM
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quote:I've collected tyco cabeese (cabooses?) for about seven years. After all that time , I still keep finding new variations. What's the deal with TYCO? It seems like they never made a run of product the same way twice.
Originally posted by Helm-January 08 2010: 4:18:47 PM
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If you've never worked in a production/manufacturing environment, you won't understand. I do, and I CAN understand why. Why, you ask? Because of circumstances like changing vendors, obsolescence of certain products, price changes, etc. We don't use stamps, we use silkscreens for our painting needs, but the concept applies, we've changed vendors a number of times due to price increases, falling out with vendors, vendor failure ( go out of business, move, etc. ), so every time you need to get another silkscreen made from a new vendor, it changes slightly. there's no WAY to get it 100% the same way with a previous screen and different vendor. Same with stamps, they may change rubber texture, paint types, they all add up to lack of 100% consistency. You can provide the same exact font, shape and size, but they'll never come out exactly the same, even with the same vendor. Because THEY manufacture the stuff, they have the exact same problem with things constantly changing from rubber to paint etc. And a company will NEVER buy a bunch of stamps for future use, same with silkscreening, you only use what you need for right now. When things change, well, you have to allow for that. You can try to keep it within a certain tolerance, but you'll never keep it exactly the same. It's a Production environment thing. Also, as you produce things, you find better ways to do them, so you are constantly tweaking the processes, like thinning the paint so the rubber stamp won't clog up as often, then stamps wear out and wear down, so you use another one, which is slightly different than the previous one. It all adds up. Nothing is constant in a Manufacturing environment, especially when you have 2-3 sources of raw materials for your processes, they're always slightly different.
Hope that explains some of the many variations you are seeing, it can be extremely challenging to maintain consistency in Production work, even if your processes are well-documented and executed, outside vendors can still affect the quality of your work. Hope this provides a better understanding of what goes on to cause all these different variables to produce a supposedly exact copy of something 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 times over and over.
Jerry Casper
" When life throws you bananas...it's easy to slip up"
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