My 11yo daughter, who is besotted by all things equine, has a Breyer 2614 Dually Pickup Truck - a plastic 1:9 scale generic model to match her (vast) range of Breyer Traditional Scale model horses. She also has a matching Breyer 2615 White Horse Trailer.
The truck has a fitted towbar with a tiny ball hitch, which fits the
hitch on the front of the trailer. Unlike most of these toys, the towbar
frame is made separately and screwed onto the truck, and amazingly the
actual ball is also a separate item - although this wasn't obvious at
first.One day after the truck and trailer had been left out as usual on the living room floor in everyone's path, an unidentified vandal stepped on the trailer A-frame, snapping it across and breaking off the top of the towing ball as well. This gave rise to the usual tearful plea for restoration.
This is the combination type of hitch, where in the real world the ball is on the end of a pin which simply drops through a hole in a bracket. This allows the use of a normal 50mm (scale) hitch or the farm type, which is just a steel loop on the trailer - you can lift the pin out and drop it back with the trailer eye in place. Noisy on the road, but secure and simple. In this case I assumed, as you do, that the whole towbar and ball were one moulding so I unscrewed it for repair, without much optimism. When I examined it, I found that firstly the pin part was detachable, and secondly that it has a steel reinforcing pin up the middle - which seems eminently sensible except that it didn't extend up into the ball, rendering the ball liable to break off. Which it did. Normally I would repair something like this by drilling both plastic parts and inserting a metal pin - as they had - but as there already was one, and it was still in the pin moulding, I had to simply glue the ball back in place and hope for the best. I used cyanoacrylate (superglue) but this might not have been the best choice here on reflection. I sourced a round-headed woodscrew of the appropriate size to replace the pin & ball if it broke again. In fact it did break off again almost immediately and the screw is currently in use. Although it's only half a sphere, not a full ball, that doesn't matter as the "hitch" socket on the trailer is just a void under the A-frame, not a shaped socket, so anything that acts like a hook will work after a fashion.
I have retained the parts of the pin and will re-fix them using plastic cement, which should weld the plastic around the steel pin and may be stronger than gluing it all with superglue. I may also try to turn up a new pin and ball from a piece of hard nylon or epoxy putty, which could be more resilient. The thing which surprises me (not really...!) is that the pin is reinforced, is a separate breakable, losable part on a £55 model and yet doesn't seem to be available as a spare part. Maybe they assume that with a steel pin up the middle, they won't break. Well, I have news for them!
The trailer was easier as the A-frame had cracked across where it joined the trailer body, but had not broken off completely. The frame is made of U-channel section plastic so I turned it upside down and clamped it in alignment, then dropped a steel rod into each U-channel and filled the channel with hot-melt glue. That gave a solid frame and was not visible from above. The downside is that it makes the front of the trailer heavier, so it tips forward (next time I'll use alloy). There is an adjustable support leg at the front, like a jockey wheel without a wheel, but if this is allowed to rest on the carpet then any attempt to push the trailer forward will bend it. Some time back I fabricated a swivelling jockey wheel and attached it to this pin, which would have solved the problem if it too had not been shattered by rough usage. So that's on the list for re-making in metal or nylon.
It seems pretty bad form to design and market a model which costs as much as this yet is still made in the same cheap way as most plastic toys, when for the sake of a little more thought or quality control they could make them durable to use. The addition of a jockey wheel on the trailer and a one-piece unbreakable towball/pin would be a step towards the quality you expect at the price.
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