Reproduction cast brackets


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Posted by Clint Dixon on Wednesday, February 22, 2006 at 1:03PM :

In Reply to: Re: Cast brackets posted by Kaegi on Wednesday, February 22, 2006 at 1:44AM :

The original castings were produced from tooling consisting of a 2-piece mold, or cope and drag (I think I got the spelling correct), where they could produce hundreds or thousands of pieces with a relatively smooth finish. All parts would come out almost exactly alike until the tooling started to wear out. There would have still been grinding required to in order to remove the flash that resulted at the parting line between the mold halves. Unless original tooling is found, most small run reproduction cast parts are created from a sand mold taken from an original part. This is where the grain becomes more apparent. Each part cast from this mold usually comes out slightly different as the mold wears out very quickly.

I have considered reproducing the original driver's side cast tail light bracket in a durable high manganese brass. I lieu of finding an original, I also have a passenger side bracket that I created from my memory of one original I have seen. It is good enough to fool people (not that I would ever try that of course).

The only problem that remains is that a license plate bracket is required for the driver's side as a transition mount between the tail light housing and the bracket. These parts were formed and stamped out of sheet metal. In order to duplicate this part exactly, dies would have to be made to reproduce the shape of the original.

I have two people interested and waiting for me to get a set of reproduction castings made for them. If I could get 100 people interested, it would make the foundry take the project much more seriously. I would estimate that the cost for just the brackets would run somewhere around $30.00 each by the time I grind and drill them all. (That is without access to a method to produce the license plate bracket.)

For an idea of what the manganese bronze looks like, see the photo of the POWER-WAGON governors. Two of these have the original bronze control arms. The other two have replacement reproduction manganese brass arms that I had sand cast from originals.


Junior



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