Today was a little frantic to say the least. I had a 10:15 hospital appointment in Portsmouth but decided to get up early and do a bit on the 914 very early on.
I’d picked the wheels up from the blasters on Friday and taken them home. The guy who works at the platers said he needed them pretty clean so that it wouldn’t contaminate his chemical tanks. The blasters had done the rear of the wheels as asked but the rims had lots of hardened black rubber marks from the tyre beads and the face of the wheels had old black and dirty stick foam from old wheel weights. All this had to come off before I could drop them off to be stripped of the original clear anodise coating.
It took me a good 2 ½ hours this morning to clean all this off with a combination of aluminium plate scrapers (I’d cut from some spare ali sheet) brass wire brushes, Cif cream (good olde Cif) and some pan scrubber scotchbrite (the green stuff that wont easily scratch) and a good amount of Cellulose thinners to clean after and remove the old grease from down and around the bolt holes
As it was a Monday and I’d had engineers working on a project at work over the weekend I needed to go into work before the Hospital appointment at 10:15. I had breakfast on the run, loaded the car with the wheels and shot off for 2 hours at work before leaving in good time for the Hospital.
I had an EEG test following my TIA last month, where they wire about 30 electrodes on your scalp to measure your brain waves, make you look at strobe lights and hyperventilate until you start to starve your brain of oxygen (all in the name science).
What they don’t tell you is that they measure and mark your head/hair with a pastel crayon then a sort of paste and glue the electrode onto your head, so by the time it was time to leave I had a head covered in goo, sticky stuff and spots of yellow pastel crayon. Not a good look and certainly gave me a few funny looks on the walk out of the hospital!
Anyhow, still looking like some crazy punk rocker I dropped the wheels off at the platters to get them stripped of the clear anodise before rushing home to wash my head.
After a manic wash and brush up I leapt back in the car, hair still wet and raced to Chichester Hospital for a 2pm MRI brain scan.
This was a novel experience too. Stripped of any metal jewellery, clothing containing metal and fitted with ear plugs and ear defenders, my head was sat in a cradle with a cage place over it while I entered the large donut MRI machine. This banged, clunked and buzzed in an alarming way for 20 minutes with me daring not move a muscle as it carried out an in depth brain scan.
Fun over I asked the lady where I collect the photo (in a sort of Alton Towers, end of the ride way).
Back in the Hospital carpark I turned my phone on and got a message to say the wheels had been stripped and were ready to collect. By now it was 4pm and a toss up between going back to work for an hour or picking up the wheels. Guess what choice my fried brain made……
They’ve come up like brand new!
Tomorrow the next stage of this refurbishment process is to go back to the blasters to gently blast the dull area’s between the polished petals to remove some old battle scars to give a uniform texture before going off to the polishers.
Once all this is done they can be re anodised in clear. I forgot to mention that when I dropped them off this morning before work the chap used a special meter on them to measure the original factory anodise thickness. This ranged from 8.5 microns on the face of the petals (which you can only presume wears thin with washing over 40+ years) to 11 microns on the inside of the wheel (under the tyre where it cannot get washed/rubbed)
The platers reckon they can get 20 microns on them when they re anodise, so hopefully this will exceed the factory finish and prove to be longer lasting.
With half an hour to spare after picking the wheels up tonight I raced across town and picked up some more nuts, bolts and metal bar from the ironmongers before they closed.
This evening I returned to my shed and made a spring anchor from more stainless to tie in the linkage return spring. While lying in the MRI scanner this afternoon I had the idea to use one of the threaded bolt holes in the bearing housing as a fixing point (which fell just in the right place for spring tension) instead of welding a tab on. Much neater idea, I thought, and also variable if required, unlike a permanent weld if I’d taken that route.
I also made a stainless spacer/bush to go between to factory recycled throttle arm and my new dual arm (to replace the packing washers I'd used to help set the positioning up during design)
As for the brain scans......they're still looking
a split second later and we’d have been completely wiped out!
