Why are the rear mud shields FTC3546, so expensive? Britpart from £72 each and OEM £100 each or even more!
They are just made out of pressed steel with a stiffener bar across.
Anyone made their own?
If someone was to buy a pair of new ones it would be dead easy to take a mould off them and knock them up in fibreglass. They don't need to be steel after all, they only keep the crap off the inside of the discs.
A 3d printer would be the answer but it would need to be a big one. I actually have one that I built myself, but the bed is only 200x200mm.
ABS would be the ideal material.
I've just bought CAT101160 and CAT101170 - fitted perfectly. And very cheap. I should have a twin exhaust - though one half is missing, so I only have the passenger side currently, where an early P38 with single exhaust would have been drivers side only.
Either way, I can't see with either single or twin exhaust how these would get in the way.
Gilbertd wrote:
If someone was to buy a pair of new ones it would be dead easy to take a mould off them and knock them up in fibreglass. They don't need to be steel after all, they only keep the crap off the inside of the discs.
Yeess. But total Yuck job. Especially if you aren't geared up to handle the horrible stuff. Bought into that idea to copy an unobtanium sheet metal Velocette dynamo drive belt cover when I was about 20. Got it done, eventually but absolutely never again. Young, stupid and bloody minded isn't a good combination! Mould is still kicking around somewhere.
Frankly pressing from aluminium with basic dies in two or three stages looks a better bet if functional rather than exact will do. 16 gauge / 1.5 mm should press to shape OK with a workshop level press. Do centre first, then main back and edge. Spin the rim and trim round I think rather than final stage press'n shear. Dimple for strengthener and bond the extra piece in. Probably a week or so of (very) part-time work to draw and make adequate dies at my "Grumpy old man doesn't hurry for anyone!" speed using the Bridgeport and 1024. But is there enough market for them. Need to flog off 50 + sets at £50 (ish) a pair if its to be worth the effort.
The more I see of this sort of thing the more I wonder if its worth outing the Bridgeport and putting a proper VMC in as the entry costs have dropped like a stone over the last decade. Like serviceable Haas for £10,000 - £15,000, Fusion 360 for the CAD and G-Code is free. When it comes to home shop guy with a life, standing at the machine for a couple of days or so is the killer when it comes to long "for other people" jobs.
That £100 (ish) a pop price is well judged. Not so much to turn "Sheesh, thats expensive." into "Absolutely no poxy way.". The alternatives are either life is too short type things or do proper weld up, blast and repaint job which not only takes lots of time and effort but isn't that much cheaper when all is said and done unless you have all the gear and skills to hand.
Clive
Sloth wrote:
I've just bought CAT101160 and CAT101170 - fitted perfectly. And very cheap. I should have a twin exhaust - though one half is missing, so I only have the passenger side currently, where an early P38 with single exhaust would have been drivers side only.
Wrong bit, those are the mudflaps not the mud shields that go on the back of the brake disc.
Clive603 wrote:
Gilbertd wrote:
If someone was to buy a pair of new ones it would be dead easy to take a mould off them and knock them up in fibreglass. They don't need to be steel after all, they only keep the crap off the inside of the discs.
Yeess. But total Yuck job. Especially if you aren't geared up to handle the horrible stuff.
It isn't that bad. I had a pair of moulds that I made to produce some sideskirts for a car where the originals were over 500 notes a time. Lent the moulds to someone who wanted to produce a pair in carbon fibre and never got them back but still got a half full 25 litre drum of resin and the organic peroxide hardener (although I suspect both are well past their sell by date by now). As long as you've got decent latex gloves and somewhere well ventilated to do it, it's not that bad a job. Admittedly, my garage did have an area with about an inch less headroom than everywhere else where the drips of resin had formed a nice coating on the floor. If they were made so the gelcoat side was visible from under the car, they'd look pretty decent too.
I don't fancy fibreglassing either. I remember making parts in fibre glass for a Vincent powered Norton motorbike when I was younger.
I think the best way to make it would be metal spinning. I have never tried it, but I have a big wood lathe I could use.
Spin an aluminium disc clamped to a suitable wooden former and form the curved outer edge first. Then cut the center out with a band saw.
Beef it up to say 2mm thickness and it wouldn't need any strengthening dimples or a rolled edge on the inside. Use a piece of aluminium flatbar bonded or welded in place.
My bad - I read rear mud shields and assumed you meant the mud flaps that have two varieties.
That is a crap load of cash for some pressed metal brake shields.
Not sure about metal spinning. Bit of an art form and, so far as I can see no good DIY / Teach Yourself texts. Its on the bucket list of things to try to do properly before I die. I have spun a simple rim over OK (ish) but in all honesty the difference between OK (ish) and Gawd thats Really Ruff was more luck than judgement.
Basic shape can be spun easily enough but the U shape cut out has a rim that won't come out of a circle so that bit will have to be pressed. Of course if the basic dish is spun pressing the details becomes much easier. For spinning best to keep it thinner and do a return edge rather than try to make it thick enough to be stiff enough. Considerable forces involved when pulling into corners. 2 mm alloy will most likely be severely marked.
I wonder if metal loaded filler would be strong enough make press tooling good enough for pressing out a few sets in alloy. Carefully work a couple of layers of plastic sheet over each side of the master to bulk up the inner and outer tool spacing as alloy needs to be thicker than the original steel and act as a release agent. Fill as appropriate with a backing plate so the press tool is properly supported. Line up carefully with the alloy between and squeeze with a press. Sounds as if it ought to work. Still best to spin the rim.
Clive
I still think taking a mould and making them in fibre glass would be the easiest and cheapest option, admittedly the most messy but easy and cheap none the less. I'd just need a pair of brand new ones to start with, slobber with 3 or 4 coats of wax polish, paint on a layer release agent (PVA), a layer of gel coat (coloured resin), then 3 or 4 layers of resin and chopped strand mat. Trim the edges while the resin is still plastic and pop off once hard. Then you'll have a mould to repeat the process with as many times as you like. Wax polish, release agent, gel coat, a few layers, trim the edges and pop out a nice new shield. It would just need the metal strip adding although in my experience getting the screws out that hold the metal strip to the hub without shearing the heads off is the bit that causes the most grief.
Slump moulding from a thermoforming plastic sheet such as ABS may well be the absolute easiest reasonably clean method. Basically you heat the plastic to its thermoforming temperature and let it drape over or into the mould under its own weight. I've done bends in perspex that way and folk on the internet suggest that not too complex components can be reproduced in ABS but I've not a clue as to whether its capable of getting close enough to make a functional brake shield profile. Obviously the size will be a touch different but I hardly think the extra in draping over the outside of an original shield will be important. Unless the old one is super tatty it can probably be patched up enough to give a functional mould.
I've had ABS vacuum formed commercially over simple wooden moulds I made myself with good results for £ very reasonable in the (fairly distant) past. Possibly worth an investigate.
If you need a set of new ones as masters for the fibre glass route then it needs to be a group buy kind of thing. Finger in the wind suggests that 10 sets is about where it starts making financial sense. If you have to buy a set to make a mould from might just as well put them on and be done with it!
I always felt small glass fibre work was much harder than bigger jobs. Big bits stay put much better and you can roll the fibres down well for a good finish. Small jobs tend to jump around the bench and I never really got the knack of stippling the layers down without dragging pointy bits up on the return. Little narrow rollers were a pain too. But hating the stuff and job wasn't exactly motivation to learn properly. Always method of last resort. Actually method of no resort for forty odd years. Which worries me not at all.
Clive
Slump moulding or vacuum forming ABS would be other options if it can be done cheaply enough. As for the cost of doing them in GRP, I could buy enough gel coat, resin, mat and hardener to make at least 10 sets for no more than £50. On top of the cost of a pair of Britpart ones to make the moulds from (with a bit of fettling to make them fit if everything else from Britpart is anything to go by), I'd be looking at a spend in the region of £200. That would make them work out at around £20 a pair to produce the first batch, after that they would get really cheap.
The moulds would obviously need to be bonded to a heavy base to stop them walking around the bench while stippling. The moulds I made for the sideskirts may have been about 4 feet long but only 6 inches wide, so I bonded heavy wood bases to them to make them sit flat on the bench. Not sure how similar they are to the ones on a Classic but my LSE didn't have mud shields on either rear disc as they had presumably rotted away years ago so that would be a further set of potential customers). There could be a nice little earner there once I retire in 13 months, 4 days time (not that I'm counting of course).
... and the brackets are extra at about £16 +vat each. :(