After seeing how they look and function I am wondering why I never heard anything about them before?

I guess it is because of the price factors. Kadee is a lot cheaper.

Nick,

You could be right about that.  After posting this thread I was reading a new post about Sergent Couplers on another forum.  It seems there are some issues with using them. 

Here's what I read;

ford86 said:

"One problem we ran into with the cars were when we first installed the dummy sergent coupler to mate with the rotarys there was not enough play for the coupler to swing back and forth on the non rotary end (would derail) so we replaced them all with scale kadee's which greatly improved the trackability of the cars, along with that we also had to fine tune the truck lean and make sure they were completely free moving.  In addition we had to get the car up to 6-8 ounches total empty by filling the bottom tubs with lead weight or metal shot otherwise the empty strings would derail. 

The minimum curve radius was 34 inches"

View the rest of the thread here.

I'm working on a First Look article on Sergent Couplers. It will definitely be more than the First Look at the book in Issue 1, how much more is yet to be seen.

This won't be a review - I won't say they're good or bad, just what they are.

I expect a fairly spirited forum thread from it...

We've also got some others who are giving us sergent coupler info and I plan to combine that with what Jeff is doing.

Jeff mentions a lively comment thread - that's the idea with a First Look piece - we expect YOU, our readers, to add your thumbs up or thumbs down comments to any First Look piece. It's your unbiased and unvarnished comments that will provide the REVIEW part.

Would you really trust us - a totally advertiser supported operation - to give you an honest review? So we don't do reviews - we do product "announcements" called FIRST LOOK. We'll tell you what it is and what it isn't, and give you bunch of photos and media goodies for the product (where appropriate).

But YOU, our readers, do the review part. Just like they do over on Amazon.

Jeff & Joe,

Awesome! 

Hmm, actually yes I would probably trust you guys to give a review but I see what you are getting at.  Sounds good to me, looking forward to it.

Sorry if I jumped the gun with this thread...DOH!

Lets wait for the product announcement now.

I put sergents on all my stuff and I love them.    I like the protoypical operation from them, they work just like the real ones.

I'm still "waiting" to get a short video clip done of my Sergents in action. My article only focused on installing, and using the couplers.

I have one more car to "finish up" then I can shoot the video. Need to get a hold of Duncan for that one, he's got a better video camera then I do.

Oh, just so anyone knows, there's a review I posted on Model Railroad Forums, and there's ALSO a review in Railroad Model Craftsman, the only problem is the RMC one does not show up on the MR magazine article search.

Oh, Jeff, or anyone else, can get a clear video of coupling, and uncoupling Sergents, I would not mind it if you would like to co-author this article.

I have some photos of the EC87 install, and EC87/EN87 comparison, ect. I just need to do up the EN87 install on my La Belle wooden passenger car.

Josh:

Jeff and I will do the video here. I have the capability with the video cameras we have here to do macro videography close enough we can study the dust particles on the coupler faces ... if you've seen any of my DVDs, then you know what I mean - there's some video footage in volume 5, for instance, where I show sliding the railjoiners onto the bridge rails (here's a still frame capture of that sequence) ...

As you can see ... that's pretty close - and we can get closer still if needed.

Joe,

 Your video isn't coming through. I've got an assortment of videos, including coupling with Kadees (they'll couple yes, operate... different story).

 Right now I'm editing photos.... Since Photoshop is not in my budget, I'm learning about Paint Shop Pro via the 30 day demo.