Hi!,
I know I've been terribly quiet for a while now.
Never fear, the restoration of my MK1 is still progressing
and is on track as far as I can tell.
Notable events to date:
1. I can now poweder coat parts at home! Someday soon I'll put
before and after pictures on my web site. Its a lot faster
(opinion)
than using reglar paints -- its quicker to apply, quicker to clean
up,
and the part is ready to use within a few hours of starting on it.
The down side is you need a dedicated oven and some kind of mini
spray-booth (mine is a bunch of 3/4" melamine made into a box
about the size of my oven).
I've been spending a lot of time bead blasting and powder coating.
I've still got a lot of parts to go...
2. The bottom ball joints on both sides of the front suspension were
somewhat rusted in place. I made a two piece tool to safely
(well, mostly) support the arm and press out the joint. One half
is essentially a bored piece of aluminum with an ID _slightly_
larger
than the largest diameter of the ball joint. The other half is
bored
to a diameter about the size of the ball joint "post" itself with a
taper so that it clears the "post" completely. The OD of this part
is _slightly_ smaller than the OD of the ball joint. All in all, a
very
obvious construction if you spend 15 seconds thinking about it.
I wound up making this tool because there is very little room in
which to
support the underside of the arm and it was obviously going to take
a lot of pressure to press the joint out. Using the usual
assortment of junk
sockets wasn't going to work in this case. Nothing I could find
(and thats
a lot) would properly support the peice. This was due to the very
small
amount of casting material around the joint assembly that I could
use
to support the arm.
Its a good thing I went with making a special tool.
It took everything my 20-ton press had in it to press out one.
I was contemplating heating the arm up a few 100 degrees F when
the joint popped out a bit. From there it was all downhill.
(yes, everything was square thankyouverymuch. yes, I'll put up
some pictures/drawings of the tool someday too.)
3. Just because I'm crazy and I need something to do late at night
when I can't run the tools... I've started playing with patterns
for an early style oil pump pickup (straight tube down into the pan)
that will mount to the later style pump body (pickup at an angle off
the base of the pump with a much larger bore and a better oil
screen).
Apparently only the later style pumps are being reproduced. I can't
find a new early style pump anywhere!
I don't know if this project will actually get past the pattern
stage,
but I've been looking for an excuse to melt some metal, so we'll
see.
Yes, I know, I could just cut up the oil baffle and use the later
style
pickup, but I'm not in a rush to get the engines complete (yet) so
I'm going to play with this for a while. Besides, I already warned
you
that I'm crazy.
--Mike
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