i decided to tackle the resto on the 36B sight glass manifold today during the "idle time" between shooting coats of candy tricoat on an old harley. i removed the assembly from the frame, disassembled & bead blasted the body yesterday then applied some stainless steel finish. today, i concentrated on polishing the small parts & hardware & figure out what to do about the little red, green & yellow "buttons" on the spinners. as you can see in the first pic, i was missing one of the sight glasses & retaining rings (replacement supplied by diesel, thanks!)so the buttons on that spinner were completely gone. the buttons on the other spinner were there, but in poor shape & none of the parts suppliers i've looked at have replacements so decided to fabricate something myself.
before;
i ended up digging thru the scrap pile & found a small cutoff of 1/8" lexan (plexiglass) & cut some small discs to size from that. i then decided to leave the original rivets in place & drill the center hole in the discs the same size as the outer diameter of the rivet so they would slip fit over the rivet leaving it exposed like the originals. a little spot of glue was added to make sure they held, but were a press fit & held good on their own.
a little one shot lettering enamel in the proper colors & they look ALOT better! you can see the unrestored spinner at the bottom of the pic.
after diassembly, cleanup & paint i added the new sight glass assembly from diesel & this side is ready to go!
i thought this might be something you other guys restoring a 36B might be interested in seeing. i always thought those little red/green/yellow buttons were one of the neat small details on this pump & wanted to retain the feature.
