Re: KPack's 1954 Panama

Posted by HH56 On 2021/10/29 15:10:42

Custom Bowden cable fabricators seem to be slim pickings now. The AC supply shop I bought several from has apparently gone out of business and one who did airplane cables had rather high prices. Haven't found a retailer who sells complete Bowden cable material in bulk but Amazon has several inexpensive and fairly long universal choke or hood control cables that would work. Some of the cables have stranded inner wire and others are solid.

You might be able to get a couple of heater cables out of one of them after discarding the knob and mount. You can pull the inner wire out to cut the housing to length or cut only the outer housing to expose the correct length of inner wire. Just be careful not to nick the inner wire if you leave it in the housing. A Dremel with a thin abrasive cut off wheel works very well on the hardened wires.

The solid inner wire type can be bent in a crude circle to fit over the pins but it is hard to do without the proper equipment and harder to make the circle look pretty. Not sure if the wire is heated and done soft or if the wrapping machine does it cold. The stranded wire needs some kind of finished end fitting. An option on both types would be to remove the plastic insulation from an electrical ring type terminal with the ring sized to snugly fit over the pins on the various working components and tightly crimp the terminal on the inner wires.