Monday, March 4, 2013

Black & blue: Restoring hard to find original inlet duct hose

Sculpted on the side of the Dino are two magnificent ducts that channel air to the air filter on one side and the oil cooler on the other. Once the body ends it is the job of some corrugated tubes to direct the air from the duct to its destination. Over the years these tubes get replaced for incorrect items and are often missing as was the case for 01464.

We thought it would be an easy task to source out a replacement but were we ever wrong. The original tube had a distinctive light blue/grey colour to it and finding something with this finish proved to be impossible leaving us on the hunt for an original part. Extensive searching yielded nothing until last week where a visit to a local Dino nut unearthed a pair of tubes that had long been painted black. A tiny flake of paint was removed unearthing the original colour below and we knew we had found our part. A special thanks goes out to Jon for parting with these to help our restoration.

The last stage was restoring the tubes where Paul spent the better part of 6 hours cleaning, polishing, and restoring the tubes. You see on the Dino these tubes are well visible from both the outside and the inside. Add complicated ribbing and you have the recipe for a really tricky clean up. As always Paul delivered and the tubes are ready to be installed hardly showing any of their 40+ year age.


4 comments:

  1. This is 100mm ID wire reinforced hose, correct? I suspect you did, but did you check out the originator of the material, Vacuflex?

    http://www.vacuflex.de/english/produkte/produktgruppen/index.html

    Also, is the same exact material used on both sides (i.e, driver side inlet to air filter as well as passenger side towards oil cooler? My Dino was missing the passenger side tube and the driver side is a very flexible material...not the PVC kind of material shown in your post. Since it has some holes in it, I'd like to replace both sides with a hopefully (mostly) correct material.

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    1. Ron that is an interesting link that I have never seen before. For sure they may be a source for something very close (the KS 7150 looks REALLY good). On the Dino the hose is the same on both sides. On the driver side it feeds the airbox and on the passenger side it just blows air over the oil cooler. It is very common for the passenger side hose to be missing as it is often left out by careless mechanics during service.

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  2. I got the idea out of my Parts Catalog and noticed no part number specified for those tubes...just VACUFLEX. So I employed the internet to see if anything came up. That KS7150 was the one I was thinking too after reading this thread to learn that the tube isn't supposed to be black. KS7150 is `grey'.

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  3. Rob, I found someone who has that VACUFLEX hose, although it seems quite expensive. He has precut sections, so do you know the LH and RH side section lengths? I'd hate to order pieces too short.

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