I am waiting on parts to arrive and procrastinating doing the rear brakes. Decided to deal with the valve gasket. It was leaking like crazy. I was intending to refurbish a spare cover ( see Valve Cover ). But I got stalled when pulling the filters inside for the media blasting. I ripped the welds, and they need to be Tig-welded. I kept putting it off.
This leads to where we are now. I have a spare cork gasket and figured a small job to clean the current cover and install the new cork until the spare can be refurbished.
And we went off the rails at this point.....
Not bad condition for 45 years old
Looking at the seal, yes, it is toast.
Since the cover is off, looking at the cam, I don't see any major issues
A closer look at the cover, it could do with a quick cleanup
Ok, it is going into the sonic cleaner. Unfortunately, it doesn't fit, so one side goes into the tank, then it gets flipped around. While that was cooking, time to go and clean up the fasteners. Again, the stainless sieves hold the fasteners and blow the media through the mesh.
After cleaning the inside, etc, of the media, a little polishing is done.
After cooking for about an hour, I pulled the cover from the tank, and the paint had started to lift
This was a bit of a shock. Let's see what happens with the wire brush. After about 15 minutes, this is the result
Okay, this changes things a lot. This is on the way to a full refurbishment. Time to take this all the way. After a Dremel brush to get the leftovers and into the nooks, then a scotch bright and parts cleaner, the cover came out squeaky clean
After masking the openings, time to shoot paint. A special paint, black wrinkle paint!! The method I used, 4 layers of paint with a five-minute flash time between each coat. Then leave it for ten minutes and use a heat gun to heat up the paint. After about five minutes, the paint started to form. Moving the heat gun around from the wrinkle part to the "wet" part.
Now leave it for twenty-four hours to fully set up.
Tonight, with it coming out so well, going to use the new silicon gasket from
Triumph TR7 Gasket, OEM Valve Cover
This is the third one I have, one for the TR3a, one for the GT6 motor, and now this one
After allowing the high-temp silicon to be set up, reinstall it on the engine.
And yes, the oil cap got polished as well
It looks good. New spark plug leads were put in to replace the original green ones. That exposed the need for a dizzy cap. LOL, one thing leads to the next
