Just to show what a pain in the ass this restoration caper can be...
After years of fruitless searching for Amal panel fasteners which hold most of the external panels to the Typhoon airframe, we have established that they are now extinct... the last time we heard of anyone managing to acquire any was a report that Kermit had found someone in Russia who could remanufacture them, but this was not confirmed.
Amal now exclusively deal with motorcycle carburettors and spares... so we decided to let our machining wizard Martin loose and see what he came up with.
Firstly, he designed the tooling to actually manage to produce the fasteners. Some of these are visible centre left of the photo. The he set to work with the lathe and the milling machine.
The ongoing production line of re-engineered fasteners is visible in the photo showing the two lengths of Amal fasteners required.
After years of fruitless searching for Amal panel fasteners which hold most of the external panels to the Typhoon airframe, we have established that they are now extinct... the last time we heard of anyone managing to acquire any was a report that Kermit had found someone in Russia who could remanufacture them, but this was not confirmed.
Amal now exclusively deal with motorcycle carburettors and spares... so we decided to let our machining wizard Martin loose and see what he came up with.
Firstly, he designed the tooling to actually manage to produce the fasteners. Some of these are visible centre left of the photo. The he set to work with the lathe and the milling machine.
The ongoing production line of re-engineered fasteners is visible in the photo showing the two lengths of Amal fasteners required.