Nylon fairleads are easy and all "modern" looking. But phenolic is original. And lighter, and cheaper. (Well, they're cheaper only if you ignore the labor required to fabricate them!)
I got my fairleads from Mark Julicher for $10/dozen. They are simple sections of phenolic pipe and require some minor machine work to finish them. All operations are easily done on a cheepo made-in-China drill press and some simple tooling.
I made fairlead mounting fixture for the drill press (Photo 2) by cutting the head off a AN3-15 bolt, drilling a 3/16 hole in a short piece of 5/8 dowl, a couple of washers and a AN365 nut. Then I used a strip of plumbers sandpaper (Photo 3) wrapped around the fairlead to polish it down to around .790 outside diameter...a nice fit.
Then I used a 5/8 rotary rasp to open up the inside diameter (Photo 4). (Test the fit by pulling a control cable through.)
To cut the retainer ring grooves, I made a "cup" fixture (Photo 5) from a piece of one inch steel tube with a washer soldered in one end. The cup covers most of the fairlead but leaves about 1/8 of one end exposed. The groove is cut with a hacksaw blade bearing against the phenolic and located by the cup fixture. (Photo 6). Turn the fairlead around to cut the groove in the other end.
The resulting fairleads are identical to the original fairleads except for the fresh pink color. (Photo 7)
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