Gravity Water Inlet - Spring Clip Missing?

This thread shows two different kinds of water fills, nccampers photo shows one that slides sidways to lock and ten's photo shows how both of mine are/were, its a wire bent in a rectangle shape, pull the wire down to unlock and push it up over the lid to lock. I broke the one on my Compact and the Airflyte is only 6in away from the house so I cant quite get the camera in for a photo.

Yours looks similar to Tens, bend a wire hanger to that shape

vintagetrailertalk.freeforums.net/thread/6923/guide-removing-water-tank-shasta

mel You have an incredible memory and are very adept at finding old threads!!! Thank You, Thank You!
That thread is perfect and thanks for the pic above.

Now for the $99 (ha, ha) question............. @ten   .... did you happen to keep that lid and spring??

And.. nccamper ... why do I need to replace before painting? Can't I just cover the hole?

Thanks all, once again!!

You have to hover your curser over everyone's name to see what to type in to tag them.

Ten's is chris2620 Ten

Also mine did not have a spring, just the metal wire thingy

Hey all. Sorry I got busy last night and couldn't reply then.
I am quite sure the cover and bale spring in the other thread were already donated to another rebuild job. The rest of the fill was obviously garbage. Replacements for these are getting to be hard to find. I haven't seen any recently come through ebay. I know there are other alternatives available, but nothing that really fits in a decent vintage restoration. Most of the modern stuff is all plastic.

There's not much you can do for the cracks. They are made of pot metal which is quite brittle and breaks easily if it's twisted much. You could try filling lightly with some JB Weld, then sand it off smooth. It may or may not extend the life of the cover.

I'm not sure I follow close enough to answer the question about paint. The one in my photos was the original on my Airflyte, and it was painted with the rest of the siding at the factory. The aluminum that was covered by the fill was unpainted under it when removed. There isn't any reason that it couldn't be painted separately then installed.

Tip about tagging, the "tag" feature requires the name you are tagging to be exact, my "Ten" is capitalized, probably why it didn't work. @ten I say that and yet I nearly never can get it to work to tag @vikx . (Maybe vikx just has me blocked from asking stupid questions... ;-) )   And neither of my attempts here worked....

@ten ... tag your it working?

Ten I actually typed the capital T several times, it always reverted it to lower case, so I figured that was the problem as well. Even went back and tried to edit it several times, like it was going to come to its senses or something.

mel explained it exactly, you have to hover over the name, weird how it's sometimes different, like yours. I'm sure the admins and moderators know why. I'm just glad I'm not crazy and know how to do it now!!

I think I will try adding some JB weld to make it stronger. Couldn't hurt.