Finished My Offset Dowel Pins ........ Finger Brake

[JoeLee]

Here's a couple pics of mine. It should make you feel much better about the great job you did on yours As you can see all the handles are missing too, and probably a few more thing I've yet to discover.




Sorry, I didn't move all the junk off them, as I would have just had to put it all back lol. A little messy in there right now....

Those really don't look that bad. The cast / painted parts will bead blast clean and a coat of paint will make all that look like new. Not sure about the bars steel parts, apron and face bar, fingers and finger bar etc. You might try some of that evap o rust stuff that everyone here rants and raves about. Or...... you could get some CF bar and make new parts depending on how fussy you are with restoring things.
If you have a big mill you could rip a bar down into fingers in no time and then just cut them to width. Then finish up on the grinder.
Your apron design is the same as mine, beveled on the inner top edge and so is the finger bar or plate.
They later changed all that to cut back on all the machining. They use the square edge of the 3/4" bar, both apron and finger bar and changed the location of the pivot point to make the edges meet.

The handles they used are 3/4" square bar. the ends are turned round to accept a rubber grip. Some of the ones I've seen use hex rod for handles. Don't know when the change was made, but your two machines are of the same vintage as mine. Mid 70's to mid 80's so I've been told by the company. According to them the color tells more than the SN# as far as MFG date.

PS............. nice job on the prop ! OMC / Johnson Evinrude?? Are you going to fix it??

JL..............

[Dan Dubeau]

Bringing them back to useful will be a struggle, but doable, someday might get to it. Every fastener I've touched so far had been stuck, but they did free up with some heat and ed's red. I have too many other projects to occupy mine time right now to even get started on itthem. I think I need about 7 or 8" of fingers, and will just make one big one to fill the gap. There's enough small ones there that I should be able to work around it. Might be a good candidate for electrolysis as I've always wanted to try it out.

The Prop is from a 25hp Johnson. Slight miscalculation navigating a shallow channel about 8 years ago..... Started building it back when I got my tig, but quickly realized I needed more practice on less critical stuff first, and just haven't got back to finishing it (bought a spare). Just another one of those "5 minute" projects that stack up faster than they get finished .