Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Rolling Your Own Gaskets

Yes. I am still working on Bopper trying to bring it back to life. The cylinder head is back on, and now I am trying to reassemble all the pieces to get her back on the road again.

A couple months ago, during disassembly, when I removed the carburetor from the intake manifold, I noticed the cork gaskets from the rubber bottom of the carburetor were horribly rotted and needed to be replaced. Now that I am back to putting it all back together, when I went to Murray's  to get the gaskets, but they didn't have any for this specific Toyota 3AC engine. However.... they had rolls of gasket material, so I thought, "hey what the hell, I'll just cut my own; that's what most gearhead folks do anywhere on odd cars when you can't really find readily available replacement gaskets from the store."

Note; To non-gearheads out there, a gasket is a piece of rubber, cardboard, or cork that goes between two metal parts to complete a seal. Getting two parts of metal to seat perfectly against each other is very difficult, and every modern car engine uses gasket material between two metal parts to fill in any irregularities, so that a fluid-tight and gas-tight seal can be formed.

But how do I make my own gasket? I recalled the woodblock techniques from my high school art class. Cover the metal part with paint, and stamp the pattern on a piece of paper.
Then tape the painted gasket picture on a piece of gasket material, and use a fine #11 edge blade (re: scalpel) to cut out the gasket pattern.
Below you can see the cut out paper pattern on top, the homemade gasket in the middle, and, below that, the piece of rubber the gasket will attach to.
You can see the new gasket placed on the intake manifold of the car.
And coated with a high temperature resistant silicone sealant.
The thick rubber block between the carburetor and intake is installed...
Another handmade gasket is put on top of that, with more high temp sealant...
and viola! 
The carburetor is installed! Now to hook up that mess of vacuum and fuel lines...

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