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January 5, 2021

Air Vents

I've been fooling with the dashboard recently, and gathered together everything that needs to mount on or in it.    The speedometer and tachometer have already been spruced up a bit, as have the rest of the gauges.  While the switches and indicators are pending, I pulled out the air vent apparatus to have a look at it. It was pretty sad.




Separating the decrepit hoses from the actual vents showed that they were very dirty, but apparently mostly intact.  Two of the vents go in the dash, while the other two go under the dash to provide air to the foot wells. 




The vents themselves are sort of ingenious.  They have a spherical "eyeball" that can be freely rotated in the housing to direct air as needed.  Also, there is a "butterfly wing" baffle inside to modulate the volume of air delivered.  This general vent design has been used on a range of Triumph cars over a span of years, but the construction has changed.  The vents in my 74 TR6 looked identical to these, but they were all plastic, and glued together, making them a challenge to clean or repair.  These GT6 vents had a two part metal shell holding plastic internal parts.  The metal shell is just held together with crimped tabs that are easily bent back to open the shell and release the eyeball.




Each eyeball runs on two rings of felt  The felt was in surprisingly good shape.  None of the eyeballs in my vents were loose.  On the contrary, some of them seemed stuck.  The image below also shows the butterfly wing segments.  They ride on a common shaft, and each one has a partial bevel gear driven by the knob on the front of the eyeball.




So here are the hard parts of one of the vents after cleaning with soap and water.  They look a lot better, but I thought there was still room for improvement.




The metal housing parts were stripped and powder coated.




Then the felt was glued in.  I had ordered some new felt, but honestly, the original felt strips actually seemed to fit and work better.




I blame the stuck eyeballs on them just being really dirty.  I took a lesson from my childhood to ensure smooth motion of the eyeballs.  I remembered how easy it was to glide the entire length of a room in stocking feet on a freshly waxed hardwood floor.  I cleaned the eyeballs well, and gave them a couple of coats of floor wax.  This made them glide almost effortlessly.  The winged baffle inside got a dusting of graphite in the hinge.

 


So here is a before and after shot.




I only did one of the vents to start.  This limits the impact if something goes really sideways on the trial part.  The other three vents followed in short order.




All of the vents had some sort of bracketry associated with them.  Each dash vent had a ring with a pair if those shovel clamps like those used on the speedo and tach.  The under dash vents just had a clamp band and a little right angle bracket.




The bands got powder coated, while the dash clamps got stripped and replated.




These dudes are ready.




This was a silly little project, but it passed the time while waiting for some parts for the dash.  Total time spent was probably less than a day, and the cost was essentially zero.

Comments to Ed at elhollin1@yahoo.com

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