Sunday 22 January 2017

FHC resto nr. 49; Heater rebuild part 1

With the work on my Defender almost finished for the time being, I am slowly picking up work on the FHC again. This weekend I disassembled the heater in preparation for its rebuild. As all steel parts will be shot blasted and properly coated I picked the heater unit closest to hand. It actually has been lurking in the cellar for longer as I can remember. But it was more than good enough to rob it of its steel parts ...





It all went fairly straight forward, although some of the steel spring clips, keeping the various flaps in their correct position, had a mind of their own. This made removing some of the clips rather awkward. Knowing you have some spare parts left certainly helps here.
The same could be said of the pop rivets that had to be drilled out. Some were so badly corroded that they had lost their clamping power. So as soon as the drill got a grip they started spinning! Luckily I have a very small Vice Grip that could be used to lock them, thus enabling me to use the drill to the other end ...


Of course lots of pictures were taking for future reference whilst I took the heater apart. I won't bore you with them all ...






And 4 hours after I started, I had a large pile of parts lying beside the work bench. A close inspection of these turned up some damage to the lower half of the plastic heater casing. So that one was discarded. Luckily some loose parts from another heater unit yielded an undamaged casing. Also the heater's matrix showed clear signs of a leaking core, though none were visible around the infamous rubber seals. But the matrix  will be replaced too. But that will get a rather non original substitute ...


So at the end of the day I was able to add another few parts to the ever growing collection of parts that need a new coating ...