I seem to remember that a club member posted that he was manufacturing the shut-off valve and handle for the 19-25 sediment bowl. Does anyone know who this was or where they might be available?
I hadn't heard that. I was once told that someone tried to make some repops and found there were several different tapers on the plug, supposedly due to multiple contractors. That was the explanation as to why no one sold repops. Of course, it may all be hear say.
Bob's Antique Auto Parts likely has a good original.
I think it was Bob Scherzer but I believe he stopped due to the large variations in wear to the original bowl. The valve had to be fitted for each application. Apparently, some users didn't think this was necessary and they leaked.
I have repaired several shut off handles that were broken by using a piece of 1/8 brass rod for a dowel and grinding a new handle from a piece of brass stock. I haven't tried making the whole thing as there are plenty of the broken tapers out there. I silver solder the new handle on and( dare I say it) use time saver to lap the parts back together. Side note, I said grind but should of said sand as you should never put soft metals to a grind stone. KB
I've never tried switching the sediment bowl valves. I would assume they would interchange, but who knows? The ones I've done, have always been returned to the original body. I also try to use sediment bowls with the original screens. I've had success cleaning them out, and returning them to service. I'm on the Canyonlands Tour at this moment, and the one on my car is an example of one I found and a swapmeet, and returned to service with no problems.
Yes, Fritz and I started to reproduce replacement handles years back but found that to market just handles customers were going to have a problem with getting good fits. Even switching original handles from one sediment bulb to another would often times still leak even if properly lapped in.
Sorry I don't have a better picture of some of the ones we did complete for our own use. This one shown is an unmachined, rough casting. The problem wasn't with getting a good leak proof fit in sediment bulbs that had an undamaged ID taper in the bulb and not rusted since if they did this meant the taper had to reamed to get a clean, smooth surface. Which then meant the taper on the handle needed to be oversized to adjusted to the metal removed from the bulb's taper. If we had had the time we could have reworked ones in an exchange arrangement but to reasonably do it price wise with some many usable ones still out there we dropped the project. The ones we did complete for our use had handles with the Ford script on them which would have been another problem to openly market them if it stayed on.
Repairing broken off handles was easy using a casting and machining the tapered end down to a short shaft to fit into a hole machined into the tapered section and then silver soldered together so a cobbled look was avoided by showing a complete handle section not just a piece of brass rod brazed on to the broken handle stub as is often done as an also ran repair.
It was a better project to reproduce ones like this one that were more sought after and also the early brass sediment bulbs that were used with it. Bob
I managed to make one from bronze round stock and bend the handle down from straight once I was done on the lathe. It does not look just like the original, but it worked. It was no fun doing all the lapping I had to do to make it fit. Guess my taper was off just a hair.