Nothing fits.

[033614]

Resurrecting old iron is a great hobby. My biggest gripe is spares that don't fit, especially body panels. I'm on an MF35 right now and needed a couple of bits of tin. A front bracket for the footplate and a bottom panel for the bonnet. Neither of which came anywhere near to fitting, the footplate bracket needed a piece cutting out to clear the clutch pedal. The bottom panel is a nightmare, it's too narrow to allow the grille to fit, it's too long and hangs down below the side panels and the hinge bolt holes are half an inch out of place! Why, if you are going to produce something can't they make it fit, it's no more difficult to do it. It's like many replacement parts on the market that do fit, (gauges, lights etc) but are not quite as original. I'm not a rivet counter but how much more difficult can it be to make a lever or something the correct length?

 

[RoyJackson]

There's a lot of old equipment that had a lot of handcrafting. Unfortunately, that's going to require some handcrafting on your part to make things fit (to meet your standards).

 

[033614]

The MF35 wasn't handmade, it's just sloppy manufacturing. It's also things like gauges, supposedly "as original" and the dial is painted the wrong colour. As I said, I'm not a rivet counter, checking down to the last detail, it's basically that they don't seem to care. I've had fuel pipes that were too short, timing chains with either too many or too few links and many others. I've even had a power steering kit for my old Super Dexta (I'm too old to heave it around any more) that needed major surgery to make it fit, ram too short to give full lock, brackets that needed great lumps grinding out and a drop arm that required oxy/acetylene and a 6ft crowbar to bend it to the correct shape. I don't think I'm nitpicking and surely it can't just be me.

 

[Soundguy]

Resurrecting old iron is a great hobby. My biggest gripe is spares that don't fit, especially body panels. I'm on an MF35 right now and needed a couple of bits of tin. A front bracket for the footplate and a bottom panel for the bonnet. Neither of which came anywhere near to fitting, the footplate bracket needed a piece cutting out to clear the clutch pedal. The bottom panel is a nightmare, it's too narrow to allow the grille to fit, it's too long and hangs down below the side panels and the hinge bolt holes are half an inch out of place! Why, if you are going to produce something can't they make it fit, it's no more difficult to do it. It's like many replacement parts on the market that do fit, (gauges, lights etc) but are not quite as original. I'm not a rivet counter but how much more difficult can it be to make a lever or something the correct length?

I think alot of it has to do with tooling. In some cases you get lucky and get parts made on original tooling.. and others.. well.. close reproductions.

For instance, for antique fords, you can get quite a few parts made just like oem, from original tooling at places like dennis carpenter.

soundguy

 

[CCWKen]

Very few repro parts are made with original dies. Many parts and stampings were farmed out to other companies and most factory dies get destroyed or recycled. Some companies obtain the drawings and remake the dies to factory specs. Others just reproduce a part using a reference part and copy it. Parts can change over a model run so the repro part may not exactly fit all years of the same model. Or the part is made "universal" by changing a few details. I restore antique and classic vehicles and see this all the time. It's especially true with sheet metal where the part is hand formed on modern equipment rather than stamped. There's just not enough market for a company to invest in machinery and dies to reproduce a narrow application of parts. A single die set for a small hood panel can easily run $50,000 or more. The machinery around 10 times that and up.

The only time I buy repro sheet metal is when I think it will save me time. But I've never seen a part that didn't need some refinement to fit the application. I can usually reproduce most sheet metal parts in-house if I have the old one in front of me. But even hand forming equipment is not cheap. Nor the equipment needed to support it.