tools & products for restorations

[roy mawbey]

Yes Jack they are nice jaws. Mine I made out of roofing lead sheet, They don't look so good now but so worth having on a vice!!

Roy

[JTR70]

Nice work Phil. The hinge allowing the shoulders to slip behind the bearing is just the ticket! Great job!

[Gearz]

[Phil Planck]

Not really a tool, but a technique from allmetalshaping.com

[Jbrooks]

Steve Hatfield, of Fort Walton Beach, FL. Just made a new copy of the P18 tool used to hold the cylinders when you are assembling an engine. $40.00 a set contact Steve at shat7@cox.net

[Phil Planck]

Well, here's a product for the ultimate restoration:

http://www.early911sregistry.org/forums/showthread.php?125207-awsome-find-this-morning-in-a-donor-car&p=893978#post893978

Phil

[Rad-Ride]

Here is a rotisserie I got from a friend of mine. He used it for working on VW busses, I'm going to modify the mounts so I can use it on my car. Not sure what the hoops were from because they came from a scrap pile but spotted this on my way home from work...

[Trevor]

Finally got around to making myself this tool for separating the skins (hood, door, etc). I used tile cutters from Lowes that are available for $15~20. I got the idea from Tom here on the site. Bruce also posted his versions which are much nicer back on page 5.

[John Pierce]

Stoddard is selling a gap tool. Their ad states: "T52-GAP Gap Tool For Properly Setting Door, Hood and Lid Gaps. 3mm and 4mm Factory Number: P1001." The 3 mm is for the bottom of the door gap and the 4 mm is for gaps everywhere else. This is for gaps in bare metal.

4 mm seems a bit wide. We've talked about this before and people have said to use 3.5 mm gaps everywhere except for the door bottom at 3 mm. Can the experts respond?

Thanks.

John

P.S. Justin's gaps on the beautiful silver Carrera are tighter and look real nice.

[bbspdstr]

Justin, you may wish to move this to another place as it's not just about a tool, but mainly a technique and a process in regard to gaps.
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Away from this site for over a week getting a pretty Aquamarine blue 356 finally out of the door and checking back in here, I stumble upon a subject near and dear: "shooting the gaps."

John, you wrote: "The 3 mm is for the bottom of the door gap and the 4 mm is for gaps everywhere else. This is for gaps in bare metal.

4 mm seems a bit wide. We've talked about this before and people have said to use 3.5 mm gaps everywhere except for the door bottom at 3 mm. Can the experts respond?"

Sadly, the true experts are most likely not on this site even if they were 20 years old in the early '50s or '60s when they were building the 356.

What the rest of us see is from well-preserved examples of their work. What I have seen over the last 50 years varied...but always even gaps. I have seen tight gaps under doors toward the rear when the hinges wore...and that meant the other gaps around the door were 'off' as well. I recommend dealing with the components, like the hinges and latches, before worrying about the gaps. Worry in advance about body sag after assembly, especially for the open 356s, before gaps get set. Note that gaps were made by leading (with filler leed)(damned English language) edges, not trailing edges of side panels and lids, hoods, bonnets, etc. Those were as formed. Make those rearward and outward finished edges have the final smooth curves and shapes and make the opposing edges follow along, evenly.

I used to judge the gaps with a wood paint stirrer...and then the sticks became thinner. What to do?!

Well, plan what you want in a gap when finished. At best, ask an experienced bodyperson and/or a good painter how that is achieved. If "mils" are not yet in your lexicon, do some tests with what will be used for a final leveling, priming and color coating. Is it to be a base/clear or a single stage? Does the single stage 'hide' the undercoats with 2, 3 or 4 coats? It all counts in build-up.

It is easy to set 3 mm gaps and have it reduced to 2 when all is finished. That's too (two?) narrow. One millimeter is .040" and it is very easy to have .5 mm or .020 built-up on each side of a gap. Winding up with .080 may look "right" but it may not.

As mentioned here and there forever, the final color plays a big part in gap "look." Dark colors are less critical but light colors demand more attention.

If a gap "tool" is needed it is likely due to the unlucky lack of a "good eye." Please don't anyone take that personally. Some have it, some don't and the Dirty Harry cliche` applies: "A man's gotta know his limitations." I revert back to "if it looks good, it IS good." If one has seen a bunch of good original or well-restored examples, even in pictures, one just knows a good gap from a bad gap that's too tight or too wide. Use a guide's width you like and expand on that to account for what is going on after the bare metal/bare filler (like led?) gap is made.

Yes, I am being critical about a detail more critical to me than "numbers matching." I grew up in 356s being shown that gaps were more critical than the GOOD thing of having a 912 engine in a Speedster.

I would warn against taking a hard stand supporting a finite measurement. I would say that evenness is as important as anything measureable, that going for "3mm" or "3.5mm" is nice, but check on how much material is going to be placed on that bare metal and you may find that 4mm is not enough.

As John is continually showing....plan, do your homework, take the extra steps to 'be sure' and above all, ASK. My new-hire lecture has included something I was told by a bonafide expert in old Porsche repair (when they were fairly new) when I was young; "There is no such thing as a stupid question...there are only stupid mistakes." I keep threatening to have a shop banner made that proclaims: "Assume NOTHING."

-Bruce

[Phil Planck]

Priceless!

[tperazzo]

Here are the tram gages I used on my car. They are kind of like a fixed tape measure and are really helpful in not only measuring suspension points for length and squareness but also to check hood openings, latch locations, etc.










The short one was purchased and the long one I made. I don't use the supplied length readout, because I feel like it's more accurate to use a metric tape measure from tip to tip.

The pointed tips self center in a hole like the sway bar mounts or if there's a bolt in there than I slip a 3/8 socket over the bolt and then the tram point fits nicely in the square socket hole.

Diagonal measurements will confirm if something is bent or out of spec. The factory dimensions are great but some additional gages are needed to get all of them. I used whatever I could measure, compared them side to side and diagonally and went from there. Luckily my car wasn't totally wrecked so I had some things I could trust.

Here's the ebay listing with many more uses too.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/221865874025

Definitely a great tool and you won't use a tape measure except to work on your house, ha ha.
Tom

[Trevor]

Here's a tool that I've found invaluable, a machinist scribe. When placing a sheet metal panel on top of another one I use to use my spring loaded center punch to scribe a line since I was already using it to mark the spots where I was going to drill holes for clecos. What would happen is the bevel on my center punch would ride in or out ever so slightly and the line would be off by a millimeter - but not uniformly, only it certain spots depending on how I was holding the center punch. Not a big deal, except when you're TIG welding and you want the fit perfect so your heat input is even across the whole weld. Anyway... I finally figured out what was happening and bought a $7 machinist scribe and it's been really nice scribing a line ever since.

[Jbrooks]

Building an engine for Tom Olsen's 63b. Had a Harry Pellow exchange with about 100K that burned a valve.

Tom bought Carrillo rods, SCAT crank, Shasta Pistons, all the nice nice stuff for the rebuild.

The rods are interesting and require "Bolt stretch" instead of torque, well they have a tool. My first experience with these rods.



Looks simple enough, but the bolts were + - 0.002 long and the stretch is 0.004 - 0.005. So.... You can't get a socket on the bolt with the tool installed. And they stretch to length at between 20-28 INCH POUNDS. No two were the same torque at final length of 0.0045. Yea not the 35 foot pounds like the OEM rods and throw away nuts.



So you have to sneak up on the bolt stretch, adding 3-5 InLbs at a time. What a pain. 5 InLbs is around 0.0003 of stretch. And the stretch is not linear or the same on any two bolts. I did finally get to use my FAA avionics torque wrench, that was 0 - 50 inch pounds.

I do not have one, but an SNAP-ON Torque Adapter, 8 mm, 12-Point 3/8 drive offset adapter, box wrench, (FRDHM might make this process easier if you do allot of these. Since the final torque does not matter. You can put the off set wrench and the stretch measuring tool at the same time and torque the rod bolt and see the stretch dial as torque is applied. And it's spline drive and fits the bolt head better.



Just my 2 cents, but this on the torque wrench or just a breaker bar would work. You can also use a 8mm 12 pt wrench, but it's hard to do, unless you have a long 12pt 8mm box wrench.

Carello rods were exactly the same weight, same with the JE Psitons. The bottom end is bulletproof, just hard if you are OLD.

[Phil Planck]

John
Say hi to Tom for me. Have not crossed paths with him since I sold the only drivable 356 I had.

Phil Planck