02-02-2025, 03:56 AM
Prompted by Dickie65's suggestion of reconditioning cork by submerging it in boiling water, I looked up the properties of cork - to find that's it really is a most interesting and versatile material:
Yes, boiling water immersion was our SOP for re-sizing the shrunken and distorted Borg-Warner 35 auto trans pan gaskets that had been sitting in open bins in the parts dept for years. Also cork rocker cover gaskets.
There were a few cork oaks planted around NZ in the 1800s, I remember being fascinated (probably inspired by Ferdinand the Bull) by the ones in Albert Park (the Auckland one) when I was a lad. Evidently there's a lot more because someone wrote a series of monographs about them about them, one logically titled "Cork oaks are Alive & Well in New Zealand"
Yes, boiling water immersion was our SOP for re-sizing the shrunken and distorted Borg-Warner 35 auto trans pan gaskets that had been sitting in open bins in the parts dept for years. Also cork rocker cover gaskets.
There were a few cork oaks planted around NZ in the 1800s, I remember being fascinated (probably inspired by Ferdinand the Bull) by the ones in Albert Park (the Auckland one) when I was a lad. Evidently there's a lot more because someone wrote a series of monographs about them about them, one logically titled "Cork oaks are Alive & Well in New Zealand"