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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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