Oil button spring...

[Ruairidh Dunford]

The oil button on my Cup sticks out too far, i.e. it is not flush even when the engine is off.

Has anyone had success with resetting the spring and, if so, what did you do?

Failing that, does anyone have one I could buy please?

[Tony Griffiths]

Here's a video of the original springs being made (that poor old lathe ain't half working hard...)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BplSiK8qK8

[jansens]

You can't easily reset springs. If you stretch them past their limit they are ruined. And you can't easily compress them to be shorter. You can make small springs by winding spring wire around a suitable former on a lathe but then need to temper them. I did find these instructions for doing that. They do seem a little out of date though!

"Heat red hot and dip in an unguent made of mercury and the fat of bacon. This produces a remarkable degree of hardness and the steel preserves its tenacity and an elasticity which cannot be obtained by other means."

https://chestofbooks.com/reference/Henle...Tools.html

Failing having a supply of mercury and the fat of bacon on hand I would measure the spring (diameter, length, wire diameter) and just find something similar but shorter on AliExpress or other sites like that. Cheap enough to get a few to experiment with. And I don't think an A7 oil button is exactly a precision instrument so I imagine anything close would work?

Tony, a lathe is good for bending round things but I always liked this machine for some really nice free bending: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yigRgG_NIyU

Simon

[Erich]

I assume that spring material is similar for coil springs and flat springs. On making the leaf spring that holds the rear tunnel cover plate down, I used spring steel cut to the appropriate size. It was annexed so could be cut early. Then I heated to red hot and doused in cold water. This made it brittle so the next step was to anneal the correct temperature. I have an electric powered pot for melting solder. In went the lead ingot and when the lead was molten, I put the spring in and within a minute it had reached the correct temperature and then I pulled it out and it was a spring. I've done several this way.

Erich in Mukilteo.