Steele Rubber Sealing

Well hey, I got my good buddy Matt Agosta, from Steele Rubber Products in the shop for me today, how are you doing Matt? I'm doing great, Dennis, thank you. Man, you know you always bring this black squishy stuff, and cause you guys this is sort of what you specialize in weather stripping and keeping the bad stuff out of your car and just having a good times inside. Right? I mean you know, weatherstripping is very important though a lot of people don't think about it till they're at tail end of the restoration.

Because it does, it does protect everything you spend a lot of money on like that interior. Right. You want, you want to keep that nice, you've dropped all that coin there. Let's, let's make it last. Yeah.

But this is a particularly interesting one, this is, and I'm surprised this is a product you've just started making and I would have figured you made this forever. This is for like a 68 and nine Camaro. Right. And, and I mean, you make rubber for everything. We, yeah, we make rubber for so many years and makes of American cars, but we made this one simply because we had customers that just keep asking us to make this particular one, because there were some issues, with the ones that are already on the market.

And not that they weren't usable, but they weren't exactly the way they needed to be. Weren't quite correct. Yeah. Quite correct. You know, issues with not having metal cores in them or, or some were made a little oversized or too hard.

This is a good example of what we go through when we decide on what to make. The 69 Camaro piece that we had well, first of all, we, we had the car so that was a big plus and we had a really good original. The better the original piece, the better the outcome. So, you, you know I mean, sure you 3D scan this and all that, but, but now with the advent of 3D printing, do you actually use 3D printing to model these things? Yeah, we, when we made this particular one, after we went through the design work and design work we're talking about 300 hours of doing design work.

So that for you is all upfront, So this is a big design, right. I mean, after you digitize and everything you have to do to take that digitized model and do the whole mould design on it, we take that design and we have it 3D printed, so we can take it to the car and make sure everything is fitting properly. You know, before we commit it to go into the CNC. This particular one has a metal Coronet, so we also had to design the metal core and build the the cutting program for it, as well as making bending fixtures to, you know, so we can bend in all the foam. But when it's all done, it's going to fit like the original piece.

Right. Once we get it done, we take it back to the Camaro, and we tried it on the Camaro, and everything fit perfectly. We gave it a, the little seal test, you know like the dollar bill test. Right, right. Make sure everything's sealed, the door shut without having to slam it shut and not being satisfied we went and found two other Camaros, that we could go and make sure that it fit on, just in case ours for some weird reason was not as original as we thought.

Right. And then we also tried it on a dynacorn bodies, the newer dynacorn body, so we know it's going to fit that too. And are they all drilled correctly too? So that, I mean, these are going to pop in the right place. Yeah.

Wow, that's pretty cool. So I mean, this, you know, like you said you usually don't make a piece that somebody else is making, but you you made this somewhat by popular demand, you got a push, Popular push Popular push, and, and you got a huge upfront investment and, you know design and tooling and all that. There are other ones out there you're not going to sell, as many of these as you might have something else but you did this really, not as a great business decision because it was great for the hobby. No, that's right. I mean, you know, we're all car guys at our place and you know, and we know the, the, you know, high aggravating it is when something's just not quite right.

And it just bothered a heck of us that it wasn't right. So you're just gonna do the right thing. So we just went ahead and did it, you know, and you know, and there is a considerable investment in this. I expect over a period of time we're going to break, break even because we've had a price a little more than what market is. Yeah.

But, I've got a part that I'm happy with. And there's going to be a lot of 68, nine Camaro owners that are happy too. Well, those that have had problems with their doors, you know, are gonna want to switch and have something that is going to work right. Well, hey, if you want to learn anything more about how this rubber is made, or what steel makes rubber for and stuff that really fits right, log on SteeleRubber.com.