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June 21, 2023
Furflex Door Seals
These cars had seals that ran around the perimeter of the doors,
presumably to exclude outside noise and foul weather. A spring
loaded channel presses onto body seams, and holds a compliant rubber
extrusion in place so that the door closes on it. As a nice touch
of luxury, the part of the seal visible on the inside of the car is
covered with a fuzzy material that is color coordinated with the
interior upholstery. I'm not sure if the original seal product is
available any longer, but one popular and ubiquitous replacement is
cleverly called "Furflex".
The original seals had a curved flap of rubber for the seal, while
Furflex has a tubular rubber seal. Other than that, they seem
pretty similar.
Furflex is available with limited colors of the fur. From the
places I researched, it looked like after I eliminated the reds, blues,
and black, I was left with a choice of "beige" or "chestnut". I
was pretty familiar with chestnut because I used it on my TR6, and
thought it was too dark for the GT. This left the beige.
It's really hard to judge colors from online images, but since my
options seemed few, I ordered a set of the beige seals.
When I got them, they really looked more grey than beige to me. I
wasn't really satisfied with the color against the leather of my
interior.
Now, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that someone somewhere
makes a Furflex type seal that would match my leather better, but I
already had an investment in these seals, and didn't really feel like
rolling the dice a few more times. With little to lose, I decided
to investigate dying the seals I had.
I bought a bottle of RIT dye that seemed to be close to the color I was
aiming for. I cut a couple of short pieces of the Furflex for
trials, and followed the instructions for the dye, which involved
soaking the pieces in near boiling dye bath for 30 minutes. I
reasoned that the rubber parts should be able to survive the process
OK. And survive, they did. But the glue that held everything
together did not. I discovered the construction of the seal: the
spring channel was covered with the fuzz material, then the tubular
rubber part was glued to the side of the channel, capturing one edge of
the fur. After about 15 minutes, I had six pieces floating in the
bath.
On the other hand, the color of the fur did look pretty good. Much
closer to the hue of the leather. Accurate colors are very hard
to photograph. Ambient lighting, algorithms in the camera and in
graphics cards, and display differences all affect how colors look on a
computer monitor. In person, the colors actually looked closer
than in this image.
But what good was that if the seals wouldn't survive the dying process?
So again, in an act of desperation, with little to lose but some time, I
removed all of the fur from the seals. Luckily, the glue wasn't
very strong, and it only took a few minutes.
This allowed me to dye just the fur part, which was way easier than if I had to put the entire seal in the vat.
The color came out very nice, and very consistent. The next task
was to try to put the fur back on the seal. Even at this point, I
thought success was a bit of a long shot. Doing just a foot or two
at a time, I glued one edge of the fur to the junction of the channel
and the rubber. By pulling the rubber to the side, I could tuck
the fur in far enough that when released, the rubber hid the edge.
After doing that for the full 10 feet or so, I came back and glued the
rest of the fur around the channel. The edge of the fur wrapped
just far enough into the channel slot so that no one can see that it is a
little frayed from all that it had been through.
I'm pretty satisfied with the match to the leather.
The seal is seated on the body seams with a soft hammer.
Overall, the match is pretty good.
The joints are hidden in hard-to-see places near the parcel trays.
I really half expected this exercise to fail at any of several
stages. I'm pretty thrilled that it came out as well as it
did.
Cost was for the seals and the dye, but I do have some hours in the mods.
Comments to Ed at elhollin1@yahoo.com
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