Friday, January 19, 2007

Pattern of All Patience

So after I vacuumed out my bug, I saw the grill around the speedometer, and the really dirty screen backing them. So I sandblasted and painted them. They look really good now, and it makes such a difference to look at. Its cool how subtleties can do that.

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Anyway, with my fuel gauge out, I decided to replace the broken plastic shield. I had the brilliant idea of replacing it with a CD case, I was very proud. The original was about .065" and the CD case was .040" so it was thinner but not by too much. I cut it out like you would cut glass, and it looked really good. In this picture you can only see the edges and the crack in the original, but you get the point.

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I should have stopped there, but I wanted to shoot white grease into the wire tube to make the wire move more freely in it. I had to take it apart to get to the tube. Like a litany I repeated "don't break the needle", but like an idiot brute, time and time again, I broke the needle. This time it wasn't so much my fault as it was an unfortunate mistake, though.

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Just like my speedometer I wanted to make a new one. I had beads made out of bone, and I knew it was going to be perfect. I ground down to the basic size, then filed and sanded it to within a hundredth of an inch in all dimensions.

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I ground out the new center, using my dremel with a mill-like cutter.

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A perfect match in depth.

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I drilled a very small hole to press the needle into. an incredibly close tolerance hole, I couldn't believe it came out so perfectly.

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After some shaping of the needle, it was a perfect fit. I couldn't make that nifty little tail for a counter-weight like the original had, but I offset the hole to achieve the same purpose.

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I was meticulous. I was "the pattern of all patience." four hours in the making, and I couldn't have made a mistake if I had tried; everything was coming together perfectly.

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I had it. Everything was together. At any point something could have broken, but it hadn't and it was now the last step. To cinch the top of the shaft over the new needle, like a rivet. This had to be done by hitting it with a tapered punch. so I did it.

Perfect. It worked perfectly. but the needle won't move with the wire! I knew the problem, the rivet wasn't pushing down hard enough. This time I ground off the tip of the punch so it would push down the sides more, and hit it.

no change. hit it again. still nothing. one more time. IT BREAKS!!!!! I kinda wanted to laugh.

I really wish I had a picture of it before it broke, because it looked really good.

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This was my biggest hang-up from the very beginning. The needle goes over the shaft labeled #2, which has splines to make sure it catches the needle. But the lever labeled #3 rotates freely on that shaft, and only turns the needle by friction, because the needle is pushed down by the mushroomed shaft labeled #1. This was done so the needle could be adjusted, which is necessary. My hang-up is that I had to drill off the edges of the mushroom to take off the original broken needle, so I didn't have as much material in the shaft to mushroom over the new needle! I had originally solved this with a rubber o-ring that would catch the lever, but it wouldn't fit beneath the plate, and so I went along with the original design, which didn't work for me...

I'm keeping the needle, since it is in good shape, and I think at some point I will try again to fix it, we'll see how it goes.

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