Hi Powerandpassion,
the market for these is booming ! if you make the BTH SC/AV12 caps I will take 4.
Andy
Here is a photo of the bakelite molding press. This stuff is still done in the low labour cost nations as essentially it is a hand fed process that cannot compete with modern injection moulding, except that modern plastics cannot compete with bakelite for specialist applications like distributor caps. No doubt as your car moves away from mechanical spark distribution, or even internal combustion, bakelite molding will go the way of the dodo.
There is an xray of a BTH SC12 magneto distributor cap, which shows the distribution of the brass pickups embedded within the bakelite. The problem with short run bakelite production, apart from having a bakelite press, is tooling, making up a metal mold and amortizing this across the three people on the planet that might want an SC9 magneto distributor cap. Now that I think about it, the SC9 magneto body is the same size as the SC12 used on RR Kestrels. So you might use the same tooling to cast a bakelite body but have different arrangements of brass pickups to suit 9 cylinder or 12 cylinder. Ie for V12 dispose 12 pickups around the circumference and for Radial 9 dispose 9 pickups around the circumference connecting to 9 HT lead inlets, leaving three HT lead inlet holes unutilised in the same bakelite body. Eureka ! I have just doubled the market to six people !! Does anybody out there know the formulation BTH utilised in its bakelite distributor caps ?
Sign In
