It has been a long time since I last reported on the
rebuild of the heater for the, by now long term, restoration project of my 1976
TR7 Coupé. And this time firmly caused by a lack of motivation! In my last post
on this subject (7 February this year) I reported that only a few remaining
parts needed assembling, after which I only had to fit and connect all the
activating rods. How wrong I could be!
After assembly of the plastic heater housing I found
something wasn't as it should be. While checking the movement of all flaps in
preparation for fitting the various connecting rods, I noticed that the air
directing flap, sitting on top of the heater's radiator, wouldn't lie flush
with the face of the radiator. Even worse, it stood well inside the two round
connecting tubes for the fresh air pipes (#715036). And it needed a fair bit of
force to get the flap down onto the face of the radiator. There was only one
solution left, take the heater apart again. But first I needed a few new bits
(mostly consisting of some new pop-rivets) and more important, a lot of
motivation. The first part was easy, the motivation took slightly longer. Till
yesterday afternoon to be precise. With nothing better to do I decided to give
it a go!
Over the past months I had already discovered what
caused the problem. At first I thought it might be caused by the custom made
alloy heater radiator being too wide. Luckily it turned out to be a fairly
simple problem. The steel shroud that keeps the heaters radiator in its
position had been distorted during coating. And because the edge adjoining the
flap was sitting to high it prevented the flap from lying flush with the
radiator. Rather easy to rectify once the heater had been dismantled. And with
the shroud back in its correct shape it was time for a second attempt at
assembling the heater:
In the pictures above the shroud can be seen, loosely
fixated in position with some pop-rivets. It needed only a few attempts to get
the shroud back into its original shape. And with the shroud firmly in place,
this time there was a final check with the air directing flap, to see if
everything was in its designed position. It was, the flap was nicely flush with
the radiator!
Remained the final task for the day, closing the lid
on the heater unit. All rather straight forward. And this time the final check
of the various flaps didn't yield any problems. Next stage will be fitting the various
linkage rods and levers, after which the heater unit should be ready to be
fitted to the car:
No comments:
Post a Comment