[Jacques Reed]

As I previously mentioned, truck restoration is on hold due to our son-in-laws serious injury but in quieter moments I will add things to this thread which may be of use to fellow restorers. At this stage there is no progress to report after three weeks unfortunately but we are remaining positive.

Here is the first one:

Making small cotter pins used in Ford "crab" distributors:

I found these tiny pins almost impossible to find or else exorbitantly priced due to postage and handling. At one model engineering supply house they worked out to $5 each with the P & H.

I found a few methods on the net on how to make them by model engineers but most involved using a milling machine or a Unimat machine which I don't have.

Borrowing some ideas from them I used a mounted stone in my drill press and ground a piece of tie wire to a "D" cross section then bent it around a small jewelers screwdriver shank to the shape of a cotter pin. Probably all up it took half an hour to make them.

I used and old pipe flange mounted on the drill press table but only to prevent damage to the table if things went wrong. With care, the edge of the table could be used if it is a round table with a machined edge. As shown, I clamped the wire to the flange, set the drill speed to maximum and lightly brought the wire against the stone and rotated the table about 30 degrees with a bit of drag set on the table clamp. A few light passes is better than one heavy pass. A bit of a rub with emery on the sides to tidy it up and you cant distinguish it from an original.

Hope you find this interesting and/or useful.

Cheers,