Cabin air direction flaps - how sad am I?

So - I've rebuilt the engine and run it on the dyno, but before I put it back in I thought I'd refurbish a few 'difficult to reach with the engine in place' items. This has seen me remove and strip/clean/reassemble the pedal box, heater boxes, etc - and replace all the heater/fuel/air trunking hoses. Because the shell has also been in the paintshop, it has been devoid of all external trim - including badges - and this is when I thought I would remove the air diverter assemblies (for want of a better description!), because I can't quite access the back of the badge pins to secure them. Well, I can but it would involve personal injury and humour failure...

It's an easy enough job to remove them, as they're secured with 6 screws hidden behing the kick panels - and I figured it would make changing the trunking a lot easier, which it does. What I found might help others, so here are a couple of pics - the first picture shows the assembly removed and following cleaning/beadblasting (it's rusty again because I forgot it was in the hot wash - oops).

On inspection I noticed that the rubber seal was split in both right and left hand units so thought I would share the experience of fixing them!

The 'flap' is made of two halves spot welded together, sandwiching a rubber element that constitutes the seal - and this welded to the centre spindle after assembly - so first you must remove the weld! I used a small die grinder and just removed enough material to get to the shaft from both sides, then it's a simple enough task to persuade the shaft to slide out - worth pointing out here that there is a brass bush at each end of the shaft which you don't want to lose and the action of the flap is made precise by a ball and spring located in the end of the cable anchor. This ball will make a bid for freedom!

Using a gasket scraper I opened up the spot welded halves of the flap and removed the broken rubber elements, then made copies from rubber sheet of the same thickness - see picture - then clamped them back between the flap halves. I had already painted the various parts, so assembled the refurbished flaps with lubricant where required (plus one flap had already lost it's ball bearing, so I replaced it) - and mig welded the flap back to the shaft when I had tweaked it into the best position for operation. I finished up with a little touch up of paint on the weld so I didn't contaminate the rubber - and I have to say they work perfectly! I just needed to 'adjust' the relative postion of the arm to the flap to get precise engagement of the ball.

Anyway, just thought this might be of help if anyone else was contemplating such a task!

Howard.
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