Hi all - on my A65 the gauze tube has become torn on the union bolt. Has anyone come up with an ingenious alternative to buying a complete bolt assembly? It seems an awful waste for just a small steel gauze tube that could be tinned on.
Do just that. Fine brass gauze can be obtained quite cheaply and enough to restore dozens of fuel tap and oil filters will only cost a few £. Form your filter around a wooden dowel etc. I use a lathe to turn to size but an electric drill can be used equally well. Temporarily wire round and solder. Either crimp the tube made or make a round gauze cap. Clean the tap or filter body and solder into place. Picture of a restored tap with new corks made from wine bottle cork stoppers. Cheap and satisfying to do.
Fantastic - that's what I was hoping for. How do you make up your end baskets? That looks like a really neat job.
Brass wire gauze cuts easily with kitchen scissors, solders easily too. Making the filter can be done (is best done) with a small electric soldering iron, but the fitting to the tap or filter body needs a bit more heat. I usually gently pre heat the body and then use a fine pointed traditional copper iron heated by a gas blowlamp, but pre heat well and you may get away with the small electric one. For the end caps I simply tack a piece of gauze to the end of the finished "tube" with a couple or so, blobs of solder and then trim round to size with scissors. Then solder the seam. With fuel taps I am sometimes lazy and just crimp to form a "x" and solder the edges up. Hope that helps.
Many thanks Malcolm - Gauze ordered, soldering iron warming up.
Make sure that the perforations of the gauze you use are no smaller than the ones in the original filter or you could reduce the oil supply to your engine.
Quote from: JulianS on 30 Nov, 2018, 16:29
Make sure that the perforations of the gauze you use are no smaller than the ones in the original filter or you could reduce the oil supply to your engine.
Nah - I'll just punch some holes in it - hang on - that's where I started. ;-)
I have been pondering about gauze mesh sizes after Julian`s post. Too fine (and hence soft) a mesh might lead to the filter "mesh cylinder" collapsing and in using dirty oil clogging the filter quickly. However in terms of flow with cleaner oil, I would have thought the large surface area of the holes in a filter gauze would be many times more than the x-sectional area of a 5/16 inch oil pipe. Which is why I think filters of any sort are made fairly big in relation to what flow is required, whilst taking into consideration the size of particles intended to be filtered out and anticipated cleaning intervals. Anyway out of interest, I have just checked and the mesh I have used for many years, in both fuel and oil filters, is according to my last invoice 0.41mm aperture - 0.22 - brass (65/35). That is slightly coarser than the generally used fuel tap filter mesh, but I always use an in-line fuel filter as well in the external piping, so I can keep a visual check on things easily. Contact The Mesh Co. Warrington, Cheshire.
FWIW -
I have just bought from the Mesh Company (seriously!) fine brass mesh #60 which equates to 0.26mm hole using 0.16mm wire. I think this will be good for primary fuel tank tap filtration but too fine for the oil tank. Cost £4.47 for an A5 sheet
I have also just bought Fine Brass #40 which is a 0.4mm hole using 0.22 mm wire. Hopefully this will do the oil tank union. Cost £6.71 for 3 x 150mm x 210mm sheets. Post included from your favourite online auction site.
Once I've spent all day Sunday cutting up, soldering up and eventually buggering up my purchases, knocking the flux over and no doubt setting fire to the garage I'm sure that I will be back to spending the £25 for the union. :-)