Tuesday, 11 March 2014

FHC resto nr. 6; That 70's look ...

I was pleasantly surprised today as I received the colour sample promised to me by the guy who will be taking care of the paint-job. Sadly it was already dark outside so not able to judge it properly for which daylight is essential. But with some tinkering with the calibration on the computer screen this is what it should look like. And as you can see it matches rather nicely with the Red Tartan cloth for the seats and door cards. Will see tomorrow if the paint recipe needs some adjustment or not ...


And almost as important for that period early-TR7-70's look is this rather obscure and crude looking piece of rubber which I too received today ...


It's our first attempt at fabricating our own fuel filler cap seal for the large early fuel filler cap. This seal is no longer available and all three my early caps didn't have a decent seal. This being the best one ...


I first tried various after-market industrial seals but didn't find anything suitable. So I was already looking for a nice after-market black alloy aero cap. But a few weeks ago (probably over some beer) I was discussing this with a good friend and during this discussion I was reminded by a recent article in PPC-Magazine. In this article the guys at PPC described how to make your own polybushes etc. So why not try that approach for the seals? And this is where the original seal came in handy. With that I could knock out a simple CAD drawing of the seal ...


And with this drawing we were able to fabricate a simple mould, with shown result. With a little more care and patience the seals coming from the mould should be of much better quality and fully up to the job. We just have to determine which compound we have to use, so the only test remaining for the prototype seal is to see if it is fuel resistant. To be continued

2 comments:

OldGeezer said...

OK, so I'm 4 years late with this comment, but I didn't see the original post until just now. The original rubber seals for the "big" gas cap actually are still available. I bought several to repair my own car's cap and to have extras for when they inevitably deteriorate. Moss Motors has them, p/n 071-966: https://mossmotors.com/seal-large-gas-cap?assoc=63205

Beans said...

Since I wrote this post I have become aware of this fact.
But we already have a mould to fabricated them. And shipping from the US is probably pretty dear.