Dear fans of mid-60s Buicks,
Anyone on this board should be familiar with Chris and is lifesaving reproduction lenses and gaskets for the 1964-65 Buick A-body cars:
http://damngoodautoparts.com/I bought a pair of parking light gaskets for my trusty 1965 Buick Special wagon. The gaskets come with an inner part of foam that appears to have no useful purpose at all . . . . . unless you are a packrat!!
Having that
"inclination," I kept the inner inserts figuring I'll find some use for them someday. Well, that someday came when I inspected the license plate light. This project started badly . . . . like there was -
no - gasket between the lens and the housing. Definitely a challenge to rejuvenate a nonexistent gasket.
So it was time for a
Plan-B. I decided to make myself a template for a replacement gasket by putting the old lens on a flatbed scanner and then using a CAD/Illustration program to infer what the old gasket must have been like. Sure it is a bit of overkill and you could probably get about as nice results by tracing a gasket by hand. However, I also have a bit of a geeky streak!
Here is what the template turned out to look like:
It is also attached to this pointing as an Acrobat PDF file. If you happen to need this gasket, you can easily print out the PDF file and use that as template to cut your own gasket.
I double-clicked that my gasket fit the light housing. I then also placed it on the insert foam that was leftover from the parking light gaskets.
What do ya' know - it fit!!
So I glued the paper template on the top of the leftover insert using rubber cement and then cut out the gasket with a hobby knife:
It doesn't look as slick as Chris's machine-cut gaskets, but it is still very usable:
It even works - see:
So the next time you feel like
giving in to your packrat
"inclinations" -
do it! 
Cheers, Edouard
