Someone asked me to explain how I made my striped hoses, so here goes.
I started with the green TRF hoses (sorry Don, I know that they are hard to
get) because they are textured. The first step was painting them black. I
used the black vinyl paint that Eastwood sells. Next, I got some 1/2" wide
black electrical tape from Radio Shack and wrapped it around the hose so
that I had a stripe made of black tape. The nice thing about this tape, is
that it can stretch a bit and when it does, it gets narrower. If done
carefully, you can mimic the varying width of the stripe.
Once I had the tape where I wanted it, I used a cheap school bus yellow
spray paint to spray the whole thing. You only need a light spray and the
color is not really that important.
Remove the tape carefully (you will probably find that some of the black
paint comes up with the tape, but not to worry, we will fix that. You now
have a striped hose in the rough.
The last steps are to hand paint the stripes in the correct color. It will
take several coats before you have built up enough paint to obscure the
black underneath. This is the same process that you use to fix the black
where the tape lifted the paint. These steps are done freehand with no
masking. If you are steady, you can do a pretty good job.
I used 1-shot Lemon Yellow and Rustoleum(sp) Satin Black for the final
coats.
Interestingly, some of the hoses dried just fine in a couple of days, others
took months and never really dried until they spent several more months
under the hood. This despite using some heavy duty heat lamps to cure the
paint.
This process is a lot of work and I can't be sure how long the hoses are
going to last (about 2 years so far). Brian Schlorff at Power British has
made several sets as mentioned by Kai. Last I heard, he was still testing
them on Lou DiFabio's TR250. They been on the car since the Fall of 2000, so
he may now be ready to sell a few sets.
Peter
'68 TR250
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