This is actually really easy to-do but before you begin collect the following items:
- A tappy little ball peen hammer
- Scissors
- A mother fuck’en frozen pizza!
Here is our metal piece that needs a new gasket, its from a lawn mower but that shouldn’t matter. This method will work for just about everything except head gaskets; they fail … to much heat and pressure up there.
In the example below we are using cardboard but if you have a sheet of gasket material then you can sub-statue that in.
- Cook the pizza for breakfast, save the box. Frozen pizza boxes make excellent sources of cheese and they are also made from thin cardboard which we are going to RECYCLE(think ing green).
Breakup the pizza box we need only one side
Place the cardboard over your work piece, in my example I didn’t want to take apart the governor(its made of brittle plastic) so i just cur a large hole to accommodate it.
Using the round side of your ball peen hammer, begin to lightly tap the carbboard. Tap the the cardboard where the cardboard meets the metal edge of the work peice. The tapping action combined with the paper being sheared by the two metal edges will cause the cardboard to be cut along our gasket area. When you near a bolt hole tap directly over the bolt hole and the tapping will cause a perfect circle to be cut out of the cardboard.
As you make your way around the work piece, tapping away, following the edge of the cardboard, continue to tap/cut out the bolt holes and place bolts in the new holes to keep the cardboard from moving around on us. Oh Mama, we’re almost there !
Close up of a tapped out bolt hole, and one almost ready to go
Following around the entire inside edge, eventually you will be able to completely remove the unwanted cardboard.
Repeat the process used for the inside edge of the gasket, to complete the outside edge of the gasket. Once you have it almost all cutout you can at this point use scissors to cut out the remainder of the cardboard(…its basically a gasket now)
Test fit your gasket, cutout the extra cardboard that’s not needed and its basically done now.
Comparing the old gasket to the new gasket, its fuck’en beautiful! To help this gasket last use liquid gasket compound on both sides of the paper gasket when you go to reassemble the part.- Step 10 … Profit !
