Home-made inner chalices?

I've been working on fixing oil leaks on Ferret hubs and tracta joints for a while now. I came across an ugly inner chalice (the bit shown in orange below) where the cork sealing ring didn't fully insert into the bevel box when assembled, and there was a horrible weld between the flange 41 and the chalice 40. It looked like somebody in the field had cut the precision, hard to duplicate, hard chrome plated chalice off a bad flange, made a new flange, welded the two together, and got the spacing wrong. Nasty, but needs must.

Then I came across another example of the same thing. Instead of the beautifully machined and plated chalice/flange assembly, it was obvious the flange assembly had been made separately, and welded to an original chalice. The flange part was crudely turned. The length of the assembly was wrong which again caused the cork sealing ring to not be fully engaged in the bevel box. And the bore machined in the flange for the ball bearing 42 was tapered 0.004" so when the ball bearing was pressed home, the bearing outer ring shrank and clamped the balls so tightly, the bearing had damn near seized. Luckily the tracta joint shaft 43 managed to spin in the bearing inner ring so the bearing seizure was not obvious.

Just curious, anyone else seen this? Was this a hack job done in the field or did some crappy aftermarket parts supplier get the contract to supply these?

Malcolm

Sounds like there was a shortage of this exact part but someone worked out that a similar one with a different flange could be converted. But did it badly !

David

That's possibility, David. Those "chalices" (so named because of their resemblance to the medieval cup, I guess) are an amazing piece of manufacturing and very hard to duplicate, I imagine.

Malcolm