How To: C15a Wire-3 restoration

[Jordan Baker]

And the inside across the cab view

[Jordan Baker]

Cab rear sliding windows installed. I bought brand new flocked rubber track for them to slide in. They are a tad tight but I feel they will loosen up with a bit of time. This was by far the most tedious assembly I've done yet. The 22 screws with the lock washer and nut on the rear. Lots of washers and nuts were dropped but eventually I got them all in and tightened down.

[Jordan Baker]

Close up of the flocked rubber track.

[Jordan Baker]

Finally after many weeks of trial and error I managed to successfully teach myself the art of steam bending oak. I want to try and make the hip ring spacer as close to the originals as possible. I ended up making it from 4 pieces of 1/4" thick strips laminated together. What a learning curve but Im glad I stuck with it.

For my steaming power I used my 1943 2 gallon petrol burner unit, 20lbs empty propane tank (full of water), some black pipe and a steam box made from 4" PVC pipe with end caps.

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The form was made up for the 24" inside diameter of the ring. This let me clamp and glue the wood strips as I built it up to the proper thickness.

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Here I have successfully curved and laminated two of the strips together. The ring is very strong and fit the hip ring very well.

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Lastly I cut the taper on the ring to fit the slope of the roof.

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Now it is just drilling all 16 holes and figuring out the lengths of all countersunk screws. I am extremely pleased about how well it ended up working. My plan is to paint on a few coats of POR letting it soak into the wood. This should seal the wood for life.

[Phil Waterman]

Hi Jordan

Excellent work, couple of questions:
How thick were your oak strips?
What glue did you use?
Did you form and glue in one step, or did bend them first then put glue on and clamp?

Last when you cut the roof taper did it give you a second spacer?

Your pictures and discription has added to the CMP knowledge base, now how to make the hip ring spacer is there to be followed by others.

Strange you should post this now, last week had a bunch of 1 inch wide 12 inch long 1/8th thick oak strip left over from a project. So I decided to try a compound bend just wetting then glueing with Gorilla Glue. Was surprised how sharp and strong the bends were once the glue was dried.

Cheers Phil

[Jordan Baker]

Oak strips were 1/4" thick. I had a nearby lumber mill cut and them to my required size. For glue I used the Gorilla foaming urethane glue. It gave me lots of time to get the wood lined up and clamped together. I formed the wood first then once dry did a final cut to size for diameter. Applied the glue and then clamped to the previous layer. One thing is that these are very labour intensive to make due to the hours involved.

Yes ive got a second spacer and possibly a third and forth. Ill be putting more details about them in the for sale section.

[Alex van de Wetering]

Lovely work Jordan! It's always great to see what creative ideas one comes up with to get stuff to look the way that it should.

Alex