Replacing a grommet

Mar 25, 2011 28 Replies

The way I'd do it would be to find a flexible rubber or silicone blanking piece to fit the hole, cut a 20mm diameter hole in the centre, slit the blanking piece to let the wiring loom in, then seal round the loom and the length of the slit with something like Stikaflex sealant (Spelling?), let it set, then insert the blanking piece into the hole in the panel. It should be good for a decade or two, unless it gets too hot in that area.

No chance of doing it like a pro and using screwed up newspaper and bodyfiller then?

One option is to make a split grommet out of a blob of soft rubber. Maybe even a mold using silicone to fill the mold would work. That way you can make the grommet as deep and wide as you want.

Take a piece of sheet metal, say 80mm square. Cut (drill, punch, chain drill, chew, whatever) a just-under 1 1/2" hole in it. Cut it in half. Fix the two pieces in place with glue, self-tappers, or pop rivets, as it's a Rover (if it had been a Rolls-Royce, start with an 80mm circle and fasten it with a ring of 3BA square-headed bolts). Cut an Autosparks C510 grommet radially. Fit over the loom, into the hole, and glue the small overlap that's resulted from using a slightly too-small hole.

These people have zillions of rubber mouldings & extrusion in stock, you could probably make something up with a little super glue.

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how about grommet strip in the hole, and a short length of pipe lagging (the soft black closed cell stuff used for aircon) to fill the gap between the strip and the hole.

I was thinking along similar lines except that instead of the off-the-shelf grommet he could use a piece of sheet rubber - say 1/8th in. thick - punched with a custom size hole just big enough to take the loom. Slit this to the edge, manoeuvre into place and secure by trapping it between the bulkhead and the 2-part metal 'washer'.

That sounds like a good idea. Easily removable too if I use nuts and bolts. Thanks, Kevin.

Disk of rubber (ex-inner-tube) bigger than hole in bulkhead, cut hole in middle for loom, cut radially, slip over harness, apply liberal amount of stixall or similar MS-polymer (because that's what I have :-)) to bulkhead side of disk. Another disk on other side of bulkhead making a bulkhead-and-stixall sandwich. Hold in place until set. Attempt to clean stixall off hands and everything else it's come into contact with :-|

Meths cleans stixall so long as you apply before the goop sets. Alternatively, try hot melt glue - but don't get it on your fingers: it's glue and it's hot.

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