There are a couple plastic parts for the PV444, that I have discovered are nearly impossible to find new. Fairly decent old ones are also rare.

I realize as I type this, someone might say OH- "so-and-so" has that part for "x-cents." grrrr. If this happens, well let's just say I'll be a little pink behind the ears.

We've been testing out our molding skills (what molding skills you say? well, we had none prior :P) , making a few parts in our spare time...
Such as this one:

Molded heater control plastic pieces

The color is a little tricky to get right. And the hardests thing seems to be getting all the air bubbles out of the piece. But if we lick these technical difficulties, we may have some pretty neat retro looking replacement parts soon.

The next peice to try will be the speedo plastic, Aiden & I (and one other who emailed me--can't remember who, now) are looking for. The problem is, all the old ones are yellowed. I did find a speedo shop in CA that SAID they were making one for someone else (I emailed them like 3 times, but they never really got back to me to say they were sucessful). Problem is, I think they wanted like $300 bucks for a whole new dash. I just need the plastic piece remade.

Coming to ebay soon...

new speedo clear plastic piece

This is the thing that has bugged me the most about my car since I got it--the speedometer plastic piece was all yellowed and cracked. Now, I have a brand new one. :)

That IS beautiful Belinda. Let me know how I may be able to get one from you.

Any further thoughts on the ashtray piece? Still need a good one to make a mold?

Aiden
Boulder, CO
1957 444L
1966 220 (For Sale!)

What resin are you planning on using? Smooth-on makes a number of engineered casting resins. I have had some sucess with their products, but have found that my time is worth something and generally I can find the parts on EBay before I get the parts made right.

Getting the color right on an old car is a big problem. Even if you get it factory perfect, the UV effect on the old plastics color makes it impossible to match. I end up getting plastic paint and painting all of the plastic anyway. On my 1800ES, I am making fairly crude polyester resin parts and covering them in black vinyl and black leather. Cost a bit more, but save me tons of time. The car will not look stock, but it will look good.

We bought a "pressure pot" from Harbor Freight (actually a pressure paint spray can, capable of achieving 80 PSI) and cast the heater control piece under pressure of ~ 40 PSI and walla, no bubbles!! This is fun!

Is anybody interested in one of these heater control pieces? I could mold a few extras for a small fee. Next step is to try to mold some plastic tabs onto the back of it (like the original had). This would preclude having to glue the piece onto the metal heater control housing. You could just affix it with some tabs in the back, like all the emblems on the car are attached with.


The heater control piece is being molded with Smooth Cast 322 resin, a polyurethane with UV resistance.

I am going to also mold the speedo piece using one of the Smooth On clear resins, can't remember which one right now, but it is also a polyurethane. It is on its way this week. Unfortunately I'll be traveling for work and won't get to play with this stuff more til I get back :(

My '64 PV544 heater control label is printed on flimsy paper or thin plastic sheet. It's faded, discolored, oversprayed, and curling up. Would this 'new' part replace that, or is it designed for a different model?

If it's for my model, put my name in the pot to get a 'new' one!

Steve

Alright! Great work Belinda! Let's see a pic of that spiffy new 48-year old part! Count me in for the heater control piece AND the speedo plastic when you perfect that.

I love experiments that are not only fun but productive, too. Reminds me of the time when... ...

Aiden
Boulder, CO
1957 PV444L
1966 220 (For Sale!)

There's a pic of old and new below "Old and New Heater Control Pieces"

Here's a pic of the speedo plastic mold:


Speedo mold


I wished I had a fairly decent ashtray plastic part to make a mold of this part too..mine is missing a huge chunk out of the middle so I'll have to either "fashion" one out of clay and hope it's close enough to the original, or maybe someone could send me theirs? Even if it's glued together that's better than what I have.

Hey Belinda, that speedo mold looks great!!!!

What piece are you looking for offthe ashtray?...the handle? Mine's intact and in good shape. Email me offline if you want me to send it out to you to reproduce...my car's not going onto the concourse anytime in this lifetime...

Take care,
Aiden
Boulder, CO
1957 444L
1966 220 (For Sale!)

That is VERY cool.
--
58 PV 444

Very cool! Excellent work! Count me in Belinda.
--
58 PV 444

Original

New

Another molding material you might try is urethane caulk. It's sold by the tube at home centers. I used some to bond the glass to a redwood and glass greenhouse I made a few years ago. Remains flexible and appears to dry like silicone.

Yes. You need to have a fairly decent original to make a "mold" for casting the new piece. In my case, my heater control piece was broken in two; if you look very closely at the photo of the molded parts, you'll see the line where the original was broken (we tried to glue it together before we molded it, but you can see we did not glue and sand it perfectly, so the line showed up in the mold and thus new pieces).

If you go to the Smooth-On website, http://www.smoothon.com/
you'll see how we are doing this. We selected a silicone molding material to make the molds. Here is a photo of the heater control mold:

silicone mold

Then we selected a "resin" to make the plastic pieces. In this case, a white polyurethane to make the solid colored pieces, with some dye --a few drops of black dye produces the gray shade of this piece. We also selected another clear polyurethane to make the speedo piece and other clear parts.


We happen to have a vacuum pump (don't ask) for use in degassing things:

Vacuum pump

I am probably making this seem a lot easier than it really is...note that I'm a materials engineer by training so I do stuff like this at work all the time! Figuring out how to do this has been quite tricky (but fun). In fact, I intially just tried to make a mold with (cheap) Home Depot RTV 108 silicone. Besides not curing properly (the mold was a sticky gooing thing), the results were also disastrous since we didn't have a vacuum pump at the time, so it had air bubbles throughout it. Casting resin into this mold would have produced a part with lots of air bubble looking cavitities in it (so we didn't even try). The second attempt entailed buying "dental molding material." This is the stuff they use to cast molds of your teeth when then need to make you a crown. :)
Again, the latex mold looked pretty good (except for the air bubbles trapped in it). Problem is, latex shrinks up when it loses water (and in AZ the relative humidity is such that water is sucked out of things pretty quickly), and in a few days, your mold is all shrunken up and no longer dimensionally correct. So it is only good if you work quickly and only plan on casting one part. When the dentist does this with your teeth, they throw the mold right away, so it's not necessary to make it permanent.

Try using Permatex Silicon Sealer BLUE for a good over-the-counter casting material. Cures quickly and remains fairly stiff so you don't need to much frame around the mold. I can't think of any home-supply material that even comes close for the stuff you can get at an auto parts store.

We have a machine shop, and while we don't cast anything (not lately, anyway!) we make a lot of one-off parts from metal.

I'm thinking of several mechanical and cosmetic items that could be improved ont eh PV's.

It's great to hear that someone with the right skills is working towards reproducing those pesky plastic parts. I'm sure that one day I'll need some!

Steve

The concrete building industry uses vibration to settle the aggregate and remove air from the concrete in the form. They use a motor-driven eccentric in a steel head at about 10,000 vibrations per minute. The vibrating head is meant to be inserted into the concrete, but I have seen it used to vibrate the form itself or the rebar in the concrete.
The effect is like magic. The vibration makes the concrete more liquid as it excites the water in it. It consolidates the concrete and the air bubbles out the top.
--
Al Hagenberger '84 240 190Kmiles, '87 744 202Kmiles

Al -
I think you are onto something.

But what will produce enough vibration while curing the piece to settle the resin??? hmmmmmm

I'll have to think about this one more, that is a great idea.

Most things that are made to vibrate are an eccentric on a motor or engine shaft; cell phones, pagers, the electric football games we had when I was a kid,"personal" vibrators.
A simple set up could be an electric motor with a weight on the shaft, bolted to your "casting table". Some provision would have to be made to keep the table from vibrating accross the floor, or the mold from vibrating off of the table.
--
Al Hagenberger '84 244 190Kmiles, '87 744 202Kmiles

Ultrasonic toothbrushes vibrate...maybe they're too small for your purposes.
I've vibrated concrete forms with a reciprocating handheld air tool. I'm not sure what the proper name is, but they're called zipguns around here. Blunt tools for them are readily available in auto supply stores. I suppose the force of the blows could be moderated by using rubber between the tool and the mold or by turning the air pressure down.

Neil

How about an orbital sander? Turn it upside-down and attach your mold to it with heavy rubber bands. There are thousands of things that vibrate - some of them have to be inexpensive and produce the right amount if wiggle.

That's exactly what I was thinking too..

But, for the small heater control piece, I did go ahead and just use the most obvious thing I could find (and it was about the right amount of wiggle for this mold)-- my electric toothbrush!

Unfortunately, it didn't work, there were still too many bubbles in the piece. But I have another idea--I'm not giving up so soon.

Great job in replicating these plastic parts. The handle for the dash ashtray is another piece I'd like to see reproduced. What is the name of the product you're using?

I do have an excellent contact in Sweden who has a knack of finding these parts, but there's so little demand in North America. Unfortunately, the nomenclature on his heater control parts is in Swedish and the speedometer dials are in kilometers, which is what I tend to use in Canada.

I remember him mentioning once that the speedometer cluster was manufactured in the USA, that leads me to believe it may be the same as used in American cars, possibly a Studebaker? I have not been able to verify this, but considering there are a lot of American parts (AutoLite distributor, Lockheed-Wagner brakes, Carter carburetor... etc) in my 1953 PV, this does not surprise me at all.
--
Cam a.k.a. CVOLVO.COM

Hey Belinda,

These heater control pieces look great! How does this process work??? You take an impression from the original, then pour plastic into the mold? I suppose, if this is the case, one would need originals in decent shape to begin with?

Can you also replicate the translucent plastic of the speedo ring?

Very interesting...very interesting indeed...

Take care,
Aiden
Boulder, CO
1957 PV44L
1966 220 (For Sale!)

As for the bubbles, you can setup some sort of vacume chamber thingy to try to remove the air bubbles after mixing. I used to help my dad pour some silicon rubber parts and we would put the mix in his homemade chamber and let it bubble for a little while before pouring.

Thanks, we are actually going to try that next.

The directions say to "cure the piece under PRESSURE" (opposite of vacuum), but this is tricky to do at the 60 psi recommended-- with the home setup we have. :)

So kinda figured the next best thing to try would be just curing the piece under vaccum, which worked nicely for the silicone mold. The actual plastic piece is being made out of a non-yellowing, high heat resistant when cured, durable polyurethane (Smooth-on brand which I believe is pretty good, I think I have seen this stuff around work, even).