5.17.06
Has it really been over two years since I last posted an update on the Alfa? I should be shamed. My punishment should be that I should have to drive a Ford Pinto for the rest of my life.
Alas it has been many moons since I last did much to the Alfa. To bring you up to speed, here's a brief history lesson.
Several years ago I found a local GTV on craigslist for a very low price. I'd always wanted to restore one of these for my wife and despite the fact that I was in graduate school and had a lot of other things going on, we bought the car and towed it home. We actually did get the engine to fire and drove the car for a very brief period.
The car was not in good shape at all. The engine made bad knocking noises which sounded curiously like a big end bearing gone bad, the suspension was completely shot, and the body was in horrible condition. We had no illusions, we knew when we bought it that it would be a complete restoration project, for some day in the future. I pulled the engine out, took it apart, found the bad big end bearing, and carefully boxed up all the parts. The transmission and exhaust and driveline were removed, and the car was stored under a cover in our front yard, awaiting the day when I would get to lay my hands on her and bring her back to life. In the mean time my friend Carl bought and had a 66 GTV restored, which always piqued my interest in the little car. I collected Alfa books and when I wasn't fantasizing about my CSL my thoughts would wander to the GTV. My wife named it Shakespeare and every once in a while we'd pull the cover off to look at the car's lovely shape. Every time I see the car it makes me smile.
Fast forward to 2006. My CSL is not back from paint, the engine's ready to go, and I have some time on my hands and nothing else fun to do. There was space in the garage, so I pushed it up the driveway and in to the garage and began cleaning. I started with the engine compartment, removing wiring, hoses and ancillary equipment still mounted to the fender wells and firewalls. I attacked the interior, removing seats, insulation, and wiring. I removed as much from the car as I could, and over the past two days I've made significant progress.
Make no mistake, this is the tip of the iceberg. It will be years before she's on the road again. There are some pretty serious body issues, not necessarily related to rust, but badly done body repair that has resulted in thick layers of bondo. So far I've found very little rust, which is a nice change (old BMWs were packed in saltwater before they left the factory).
I've restored a lot of old cars in my life, and I must say, that despite some bad bodywork, this car is remarkably original. There haven't been any aggregious attacks on her interior, no 6X9 speaker holes cut in the door panels, no chopped body bits. It will be a lot of work, but what I have to start with is not horrible.
The goal is to have her completely stripped to a bare shell on a rolling dolly sometime this summer. She'll then go to be plastic media blasted and primered so that I can begin the bodywork. When I sold my CS I used some of the funds to equip my workshop with a proper air compressor (5HP, 60 gallon tank IR rated at 12.3 CFM at 120PSI). This thing should handle just about any work I need, including sanding, grinding and painting) and a Millermatic 210 MiG welder (I can also do aluminum).
Over the past couple of days I've been removing seats, wiring, interior, and every part that isn't part of the shell and either boxing it or throwing it away. As you can see from the pictures above, there is a lot to do. The front left fender has been pretty mangled over the years, and is probably going to need to be completely replaced, Ditto for the front clip which has serious amounts of damage. Luckily the rest of the car is not too bad. For the most part it's very clean, with only mild surface rust (for the most part). There are several rust areas which will need to be fixed, but for a nearly 40 year old car that has been sitting a lot over the past ten, she looks pretty good. I can only compare it to my BMW CS/CSL experience and in that light the car is amazing. An E9 BMW would be rusted horribly with this sort of history.
I've been making good use of my Dynabrade angle grinder, and my DA Dynabrade sander. Using 3M sanding discs I've checked several areas of the car and have been happy to find fairly clean metal. So far, so good. There's plenty more work to be done.
Ciao!
9.19.03
It is with great shame that I announce that virtually no progress has been made on the Alfa since the beginning of the summer. The last time I wrote I had been cutting up an old CS body and hauling it off to the recycler. That job is done and the space that it gave us was available for only a brief amount of time.
I had moved the Alfa to the garage in hopes of stripping the body but soon two new projects loomed on the horizon, one for the house, the other for income. The house project is the construction of a retaining wall for our front yard and it's quite a task. All told the wall will be over 40 feet long, involve one 90 degree corner and a nearly 180 degree bend. It will be 4 feet tall and constructed of interlocking cinder blocks. As with many things the bulk of the work is preparation, and with retaining walls preparation involves digging......lots of digging. That project along with my continued studies have robbed the Alfa of attention.
Additionally, I've taken on a project to put together a friend's BMW CSL. Despite the guilt felt over not working on the Alfa I'm hoping some of the funds from the CSL job will help me to acquire some tools (such as a welder) and parts for the Alfa so in the long run it is good for the Alfa. It just makes the Alfa's restoration a longer run.
A month ago we made our annual 40 mile trek south to Laguna Seca for the Historic races and also to the Concorso Italiano. There were lots of pretty Alfas, Ferraris and other Italian marques there as usual. Since I have no pictures of our Alfa that are of interest, I included a couple from the show for you to appreciate. The yellow Fiat 500 belongs to my father Joe. This show was the maiden voyage for the little car following a 2 year restoration. Cute ain't it?
7.15.03
Work has definitely stalled on the Alfa over the past couple of months. Several work and school-related activities have kept me from getting work done on it. Most significant is my project to finally cut up and discard the smashed CS (affectionately dubbed, "The Hulk") from my yard so that I can make room to work on the Alfa.
I began the process a couple weeks ago, by removing the engine and using an oxy/acetyln torch to cut the old thing up. It was hot out and cutting up a car this way is NASTY work. Every time you hit places that have been undercoated, big black plumes of smoke waft in to your face. To make matters worse, big molten globs of metal fly through the air, usually landing somewhere in your shoe or inside your glove where they burn your skin while you frantically try to remove said article of clothing. It is NOT fun!
After a lot of sweating and a lot of work I'd gotten the car cut up in to some more manageable pieces but we ran out of oxygen before we could finish the job.
With this now accomplished I could put some of the pieces in the bed of my truck and run them to the junkyard to be recycled.
See you all next week!
Ciao!
5.25.2003-Long Time Gone
It has been a long time since I'd spent any time on the Alfa. Spring here in Northern California was one of the wettest on record and that prevented me for accomplishing a lot of things that were necessary in order go play with the Alfa.
Additionally, my pursuit of higher education took me out of the country for a couple weekends. All of this meant no time to work on the Alfa!
This weekend the weather allowed me to move some vehicles around and I was able to get the Alfa in to the garage to begin disassembly.
Despite the fact that our driveway is steep, I was able to push the little car up in to the garage by myself. Of course the engine is out, but it's still impressive to be able to do this.
I wasn't sure where to start. The car needs to be completely taken apart so that it can be media blasted. I need to take the doors off and for this I'll need a impact driver to get the philips head screws that hold the hinges to the door jamb. I started cutting the window gasket out for windshield removal, and also began to remove the interior trim. As you can see from this engine bay shot there is a lot of work to do, and a lot of cleaning as well.
I'm sure it will take many evenings to get the car stripped bare, but what else am I going to do with my time?
See you all next week!
Ciao!
3.23.2003-What a Blast!
This weekend saw some actual work done on the Alfa. I had a box full of engine and transmission mount parts that I removed when I took the engine and gearbox out that were crying out for attention. The paint on them was horrible, they were greasy and bent. The rubber bushes for the transmission cross-member were competely destroyed.
Thanks to my good friend Jon Nichols of Nichols Manufacturing (purveyor of Head-up Displays to the military and lightweight flywheels and clutchbaskets for Ducati owners) I was able to bead blast the box full of parts in his blast cabinet. Having access to this piece of equipment was invaluable when I restored my CS and if I were able to have my pick of home workshop tools a bead blasting cabinet would be right up there with a welder and a plasma cutter. Hopefully someday I'll have one, but in the mean time I'm lucky to have the occasional use of Jon's. The bead blasting made quick work of prepping all the parts for powder coating, and I was even able to use his 50-ton press to remove the wasted bushings.
This week for the first time in a while I have pictures! See the before and after pictures and you'll understand why I think bead blasting is so cool. With a little work these guys will be ready for powdercoating, at which point I'll box them up and store them until the day I'm ready to re-install them on the car.
Saturday also saw the second meeting of the growing local Northern California Alfa/BMW owner's Pose-n-drive session. This event saw the addition of a new face, Mr. Erik Lutkin, whose Silver 74 GTV joined Tom Hardy's 67, Jeff Mc Neill's wonderfully restored 74, and my CS. We met at Alice's Restaurant and after a short pose session we headed out Highway 84 toward the coast. With the exception of a large gaggle of bicyclists whose presence severely limited us for a few miles the roads were clean and clear and we had a nice time swapping the lead. I even got some video of us screaming Westward toward Highway 1. We then headed south on 1 along the coast, and then up through Soquel back to the house for sandwiches and bench racing on the deck.
Perhaps more local Alfisti will come out of the woodwork and we can begin making this a semi-regular event.
Ciao!
3.02.2003-Tapped Out
Follows a tale of two cars, one of Italian origin, long in the tooth and in need of love. The other, much newer and of Teutonic background still requires occasional love (as do all things with wheels and hearts).
My wife's 1997 Z3 had developed an oil leak that continued to get worse as the months passed. By last week the oil slick underneath the engine was starting to get embarrassing. Despite the fact that our garage floor is painted it was getting to be a real drag cleaning up oil every day. Besides that, German cars, new German cars, should just not leak oil.
I decided to find the source of the leak but a floor jack and jack stands did not allow me the perspective I needed to see where the oil was coming from. Last week I stopped by to see my good friends at Independent BMW of Palo Alto to see if they could help me out. With the car on one of their lifts Mike quickly informed me that it was the oil filter housing (huh?). "Costs about $500 including the part", he said. Yikes. I gave him some money for his time and thanked him before getting on my way. Since our car was supposedly still under warranty I decided to take it back to the dealer to have them fix it. Turns out BMW North America knows about this leaking oil filter housing problem. There are service bulletins out on it, and a revised part # that fixes the problems of the old part. I schedule the car for the service and drop it off. Three or four hours later I receive a call from the dealer ungraciously telling me that the car's warranty expired two weeks ago and that they would have to charge me (over $500) for the part and labor. "Sure you will", I thought to myself.
The reason I'm telling you all this is that I spent Saturday morning installing the part myself. That, combined with the other chores and workload on my desk right now prevented me from getting much quality time with the Alfa block, but I did manage to touch it for a little while and effect some positive change. As it turned out, the work on the little Bimmer was not too arduous, and only took 3 hours or so. Modern engines are both fun and frustrating to work on as despite the compact nature of their design, the fasteners and components themselves are usually in good shape and easy to remove. The Z3's alternator has it's own air intake and duct to keep it cool! The oil filter housing itself is something that Alfa Romeo would be proud of. It's cast aluminum, rather pretty for a German part, and rather intricate. It also costs a lot of money. Now the work is done, the car is driveable, and there's no more oil on the garage floor after she leaves.
On to the Alfa. I borrowed a set of Metric taps and dies from my father and am chasing all the threads on the studs and tapped holes in the block. Some of the auxilliary studs are a bit damaged so I'll be replaceing them when the time comes. Once that was done I chucked up a wire brush in a handheld drill and worked on removing the corrosion from the cylinder head studs. I've got some more work to do, but so far the brush does a good job and the studs themselves look great.
Next weekend is a TEMBA weekend and my current coursework is Economic Analysis for Global Business so I'm sure I'll have something fun to talk about next weekend in relating my Bschool learning to Alfa Romeo.
Ciao!
2.23.2003-Don't Stop Cleaning, it's gonna be a car someday
Sadly there is not much in the way of news to report this week. I did move the block back to the solvent tank for another round of cleaning now that the liners are out. I managed to get a lot of the junk that was caked around the inside of the block out and now I'm ready to go at it with a slightly more abrasive media. I'm going to use a wire brush chucked up in an electric drill to clean the corrosion off the studs and on some of the other areas. After that I'll chase all the threads with the appropriate die and get the block cleaned for reassembly. It's pretty much at it's most elemental state right now, there's really nothing else to remove.
I also began removing the head gasket material from the top of the block. This is a trick job because it's important to have a clean and uniform surface for reassembly but one has to be careful the way you remove the old gasket. The Alfa gaskets have a built in adhesive that gets activated with heat in order to seal the head to the block. This results in a rather thick coating of gasket material and glue on the head and the block upon disassembly. You must be careful if you use a razor blade to remove this stuff as the head and block are obviously aluminum which is obviously soft, so obviously you could do great damage if you're not careful. Obviously, I attempted to be careful. I found that some steel wool soaked in lacquer thinner did a good job of softening the material and that scrubbing on the surface helped clean it up pretty well. There is much more work to be done, but I'm confident that with time, elbow grease and patience I can get the head and the block cleaned properly.
The pictures at the right show this work as well as the inside of the block now that I've given it a first cleaning. It will get much prettier after I get in there with a wire brush to clean it up.
Ciao!
2.16.2003
Last time I touched the Alfa engine block it was to give it a bath in the solvent tank. With that job now completed I needed to figure out whether or not I was going to remove the cylinder liners. I originally had planned to leave them in as they looked to be in good condition, there was no signs of leakage from the seals, and they were in place pretty well.
After mulling the situation over I decided to pull them out, mostly so that I could clean the passages around the liners at the bottom of the block. There was some pretty heavy corrosion and rust in there and I couldn't see that I'd be able to effectively get it out with the liners in place.
So, with an easy 180 degree rotation of my wonderful AutoComponenti modified engine stand I had the block upside down and was ready to remove the liners.
Some gentle but persistent tapping with a brass drift and a hammer and the liners slowly came out of the block.
Now I'm ready to throughly scrub the block to remove the corrosion and dirt. Then I'll make the decision as to whether or not I'll re-use the liners or buy a complete matched set of liners and pistons.
Ciao!
2.02.2003
For some reason this page got overwritten last week when I updated the site and the pictures of the cleaned engine block were missing. Here then, are the pictures of the engine block looking a lot cleaner after spending some time in the solvent tank.
It was very satisfying to clean off the years of oil and crud that coated the entire engine block. It's looking a little cleaner and a lot nicer now.
My next step will be to remove the liners so that I can clean the area around the studs and the water passages. The liners are in there pretty good, I hope I'm able to get them out without having to resort to a hydraulic press.
Ciao!
1.26.2003-Super Bowl Weekend
A lot has been going on in my personal life lately and it's been impacting the amount of time I've been able to spend on the Alfa engine. That's ok by me as this project is not one that I expect to be completed in 12 months. In one week I begin a year-long MBA program and I've been preparing during the evenings rather than spending them in the garage. I have made some progress since last week though.
Last time I left the engine I had most of the con-rod caps off the crank but the crank itself was still in the block, and the pistons were still in the liners. I had not figured out how to pull the number 5 main bearing cap out of its mortised position in the rear of the block, and I had not pulled the front timing gear off the crank. Both of these situations prevented the crank from being removed from the block. I was anxious to get it all apart so that I could begin cleaning the various parts and determining what's needed for re-assembly.
The first thing task I tackled was pulling that number 5 main bearing cap. This turned out to be much easier than expected, and a few taps with a jelly-head hammer got it out far enough that I could just lever it right out without damaging the aluminum.
Moving to the front of the block I again tapped gently on the keyed timing gear and it was soon off too, along with the lower timing chain and the intermediate gear.
With these pieces now off, I could lift the crank out of the block. In doing so I found yet another failed bearing on the number two con-rod. This one had actually fractured in to two pieces. I don't know if this engine was run out of oil or if the oil galleys in the crank were plugged but something sinister definitely fell on the bottom end.
I then discovered that you can in fact push the pistons out of the liners from the bottom and so soon I had all four pistons out of the block. At this point it's now a bare block (with the liners still intact) covered in lots of grease. I'll make sure to get some pictures before and after so you can see all the pieces in their glory. The next step is to get that block in the tank and introduce it to the wonderful cleaning powers of solvent. Then I'll inspect the bores, measure the ring gaps and determine whether or not she needs a new set of liners and pistons.
Check back in a day or so and I should have some pictures posted of these latest results.
Ciao!
5.17.06
Has it really been over two years since I last posted an update on the Alfa? I should be shamed. My punishment should be that I should have to drive a Ford Pinto for the rest of my life.
Alas it has been many moons since I last did much to the Alfa. To bring you up to speed, here's a brief history lesson.
Several years ago I found a local GTV on craigslist for a very low price. I'd always wanted to restore one of these for my wife and despite the fact that I was in graduate school and had a lot of other things going on, we bought the car and towed it home. We actually did get the engine to fire and drove the car for a very brief period.
The car was not in good shape at all. The engine made bad knocking noises which sounded curiously like a big end bearing gone bad, the suspension was completely shot, and the body was in horrible condition. We had no illusions, we knew when we bought it that it would be a complete restoration project, for some day in the future. I pulled the engine out, took it apart, found the bad big end bearing, and carefully boxed up all the parts. The transmission and exhaust and driveline were removed, and the car was stored under a cover in our front yard, awaiting the day when I would get to lay my hands on her and bring her back to life. In the mean time my friend Carl bought and had a 66 GTV restored, which always piqued my interest in the little car. I collected Alfa books and when I wasn't fantasizing about my CSL my thoughts would wander to the GTV. My wife named it Shakespeare and every once in a while we'd pull the cover off to look at the car's lovely shape. Every time I see the car it makes me smile.
Fast forward to 2006. My CSL is not back from paint, the engine's ready to go, and I have some time on my hands and nothing else fun to do. There was space in the garage, so I pushed it up the driveway and in to the garage and began cleaning. I started with the engine compartment, removing wiring, hoses and ancillary equipment still mounted to the fender wells and firewalls. I attacked the interior, removing seats, insulation, and wiring. I removed as much from the car as I could, and over the past two days I've made significant progress.
Make no mistake, this is the tip of the iceberg. It will be years before she's on the road again. There are some pretty serious body issues, not necessarily related to rust, but badly done body repair that has resulted in thick layers of bondo. So far I've found very little rust, which is a nice change (old BMWs were packed in saltwater before they left the factory).
I've restored a lot of old cars in my life, and I must say, that despite some bad bodywork, this car is remarkably original. There haven't been any aggregious attacks on her interior, no 6X9 speaker holes cut in the door panels, no chopped body bits. It will be a lot of work, but what I have to start with is not horrible.
The goal is to have her completely stripped to a bare shell on a rolling dolly sometime this summer. She'll then go to be plastic media blasted and primered so that I can begin the bodywork. When I sold my CS I used some of the funds to equip my workshop with a proper air compressor (5HP, 60 gallon tank IR rated at 12.3 CFM at 120PSI). This thing should handle just about any work I need, including sanding, grinding and painting) and a Millermatic 210 MiG welder (I can also do aluminum).
Over the past couple of days I've been removing seats, wiring, interior, and every part that isn't part of the shell and either boxing it or throwing it away. As you can see from the pictures above, there is a lot to do. The front left fender has been pretty mangled over the years, and is probably going to need to be completely replaced, Ditto for the front clip which has serious amounts of damage. Luckily the rest of the car is not too bad. For the most part it's very clean, with only mild surface rust (for the most part). There are several rust areas which will need to be fixed, but for a nearly 40 year old car that has been sitting a lot over the past ten, she looks pretty good. I can only compare it to my BMW CS/CSL experience and in that light the car is amazing. An E9 BMW would be rusted horribly with this sort of history.
I've been making good use of my Dynabrade angle grinder, and my DA Dynabrade sander. Using 3M sanding discs I've checked several areas of the car and have been happy to find fairly clean metal. So far, so good. There's plenty more work to be done.
Ciao!
9.19.03
It is with great shame that I announce that virtually no progress has been made on the Alfa since the beginning of the summer. The last time I wrote I had been cutting up an old CS body and hauling it off to the recycler. That job is done and the space that it gave us was available for only a brief amount of time.
I had moved the Alfa to the garage in hopes of stripping the body but soon two new projects loomed on the horizon, one for the house, the other for income. The house project is the construction of a retaining wall for our front yard and it's quite a task. All told the wall will be over 40 feet long, involve one 90 degree corner and a nearly 180 degree bend. It will be 4 feet tall and constructed of interlocking cinder blocks. As with many things the bulk of the work is preparation, and with retaining walls preparation involves digging......lots of digging. That project along with my continued studies have robbed the Alfa of attention.
Additionally, I've taken on a project to put together a friend's BMW CSL. Despite the guilt felt over not working on the Alfa I'm hoping some of the funds from the CSL job will help me to acquire some tools (such as a welder) and parts for the Alfa so in the long run it is good for the Alfa. It just makes the Alfa's restoration a longer run.
A month ago we made our annual 40 mile trek south to Laguna Seca for the Historic races and also to the Concorso Italiano. There were lots of pretty Alfas, Ferraris and other Italian marques there as usual. Since I have no pictures of our Alfa that are of interest, I included a couple from the show for you to appreciate. The yellow Fiat 500 belongs to my father Joe. This show was the maiden voyage for the little car following a 2 year restoration. Cute ain't it?
7.15.03
Work has definitely stalled on the Alfa over the past couple of months. Several work and school-related activities have kept me from getting work done on it. Most significant is my project to finally cut up and discard the smashed CS (affectionately dubbed, "The Hulk") from my yard so that I can make room to work on the Alfa.
I began the process a couple weeks ago, by removing the engine and using an oxy/acetyln torch to cut the old thing up. It was hot out and cutting up a car this way is NASTY work. Every time you hit places that have been undercoated, big black plumes of smoke waft in to your face. To make matters worse, big molten globs of metal fly through the air, usually landing somewhere in your shoe or inside your glove where they burn your skin while you frantically try to remove said article of clothing. It is NOT fun!
After a lot of sweating and a lot of work I'd gotten the car cut up in to some more manageable pieces but we ran out of oxygen before we could finish the job.
With this now accomplished I could put some of the pieces in the bed of my truck and run them to the junkyard to be recycled.
See you all next week!
Ciao!
5.25.2003-Long Time Gone
It has been a long time since I'd spent any time on the Alfa. Spring here in Northern California was one of the wettest on record and that prevented me for accomplishing a lot of things that were necessary in order go play with the Alfa.
Additionally, my pursuit of higher education took me out of the country for a couple weekends. All of this meant no time to work on the Alfa!
This weekend the weather allowed me to move some vehicles around and I was able to get the Alfa in to the garage to begin disassembly.
Despite the fact that our driveway is steep, I was able to push the little car up in to the garage by myself. Of course the engine is out, but it's still impressive to be able to do this.
I wasn't sure where to start. The car needs to be completely taken apart so that it can be media blasted. I need to take the doors off and for this I'll need a impact driver to get the philips head screws that hold the hinges to the door jamb. I started cutting the window gasket out for windshield removal, and also began to remove the interior trim. As you can see from this engine bay shot there is a lot of work to do, and a lot of cleaning as well.
I'm sure it will take many evenings to get the car stripped bare, but what else am I going to do with my time?
See you all next week!
Ciao!
3.23.2003-What a Blast!
This weekend saw some actual work done on the Alfa. I had a box full of engine and transmission mount parts that I removed when I took the engine and gearbox out that were crying out for attention. The paint on them was horrible, they were greasy and bent. The rubber bushes for the transmission cross-member were competely destroyed.
Thanks to my good friend Jon Nichols of Nichols Manufacturing (purveyor of Head-up Displays to the military and lightweight flywheels and clutchbaskets for Ducati owners) I was able to bead blast the box full of parts in his blast cabinet. Having access to this piece of equipment was invaluable when I restored my CS and if I were able to have my pick of home workshop tools a bead blasting cabinet would be right up there with a welder and a plasma cutter. Hopefully someday I'll have one, but in the mean time I'm lucky to have the occasional use of Jon's. The bead blasting made quick work of prepping all the parts for powder coating, and I was even able to use his 50-ton press to remove the wasted bushings.
This week for the first time in a while I have pictures! See the before and after pictures and you'll understand why I think bead blasting is so cool. With a little work these guys will be ready for powdercoating, at which point I'll box them up and store them until the day I'm ready to re-install them on the car.
Saturday also saw the second meeting of the growing local Northern California Alfa/BMW owner's Pose-n-drive session. This event saw the addition of a new face, Mr. Erik Lutkin, whose Silver 74 GTV joined Tom Hardy's 67, Jeff Mc Neill's wonderfully restored 74, and my CS. We met at Alice's Restaurant and after a short pose session we headed out Highway 84 toward the coast. With the exception of a large gaggle of bicyclists whose presence severely limited us for a few miles the roads were clean and clear and we had a nice time swapping the lead. I even got some video of us screaming Westward toward Highway 1. We then headed south on 1 along the coast, and then up through Soquel back to the house for sandwiches and bench racing on the deck.
Perhaps more local Alfisti will come out of the woodwork and we can begin making this a semi-regular event.
Ciao!
3.02.2003-Tapped Out
Follows a tale of two cars, one of Italian origin, long in the tooth and in need of love. The other, much newer and of Teutonic background still requires occasional love (as do all things with wheels and hearts).
My wife's 1997 Z3 had developed an oil leak that continued to get worse as the months passed. By last week the oil slick underneath the engine was starting to get embarrassing. Despite the fact that our garage floor is painted it was getting to be a real drag cleaning up oil every day. Besides that, German cars, new German cars, should just not leak oil.
I decided to find the source of the leak but a floor jack and jack stands did not allow me the perspective I needed to see where the oil was coming from. Last week I stopped by to see my good friends at Independent BMW of Palo Alto to see if they could help me out. With the car on one of their lifts Mike quickly informed me that it was the oil filter housing (huh?). "Costs about $500 including the part", he said. Yikes. I gave him some money for his time and thanked him before getting on my way. Since our car was supposedly still under warranty I decided to take it back to the dealer to have them fix it. Turns out BMW North America knows about this leaking oil filter housing problem. There are service bulletins out on it, and a revised part # that fixes the problems of the old part. I schedule the car for the service and drop it off. Three or four hours later I receive a call from the dealer ungraciously telling me that the car's warranty expired two weeks ago and that they would have to charge me (over $500) for the part and labor. "Sure you will", I thought to myself.
The reason I'm telling you all this is that I spent Saturday morning installing the part myself. That, combined with the other chores and workload on my desk right now prevented me from getting much quality time with the Alfa block, but I did manage to touch it for a little while and effect some positive change. As it turned out, the work on the little Bimmer was not too arduous, and only took 3 hours or so. Modern engines are both fun and frustrating to work on as despite the compact nature of their design, the fasteners and components themselves are usually in good shape and easy to remove. The Z3's alternator has it's own air intake and duct to keep it cool! The oil filter housing itself is something that Alfa Romeo would be proud of. It's cast aluminum, rather pretty for a German part, and rather intricate. It also costs a lot of money. Now the work is done, the car is driveable, and there's no more oil on the garage floor after she leaves.
On to the Alfa. I borrowed a set of Metric taps and dies from my father and am chasing all the threads on the studs and tapped holes in the block. Some of the auxilliary studs are a bit damaged so I'll be replaceing them when the time comes. Once that was done I chucked up a wire brush in a handheld drill and worked on removing the corrosion from the cylinder head studs. I've got some more work to do, but so far the brush does a good job and the studs themselves look great.
Next weekend is a TEMBA weekend and my current coursework is Economic Analysis for Global Business so I'm sure I'll have something fun to talk about next weekend in relating my Bschool learning to Alfa Romeo.
Ciao!
2.23.2003-Don't Stop Cleaning, it's gonna be a car someday
Sadly there is not much in the way of news to report this week. I did move the block back to the solvent tank for another round of cleaning now that the liners are out. I managed to get a lot of the junk that was caked around the inside of the block out and now I'm ready to go at it with a slightly more abrasive media. I'm going to use a wire brush chucked up in an electric drill to clean the corrosion off the studs and on some of the other areas. After that I'll chase all the threads with the appropriate die and get the block cleaned for reassembly. It's pretty much at it's most elemental state right now, there's really nothing else to remove.
I also began removing the head gasket material from the top of the block. This is a trick job because it's important to have a clean and uniform surface for reassembly but one has to be careful the way you remove the old gasket. The Alfa gaskets have a built in adhesive that gets activated with heat in order to seal the head to the block. This results in a rather thick coating of gasket material and glue on the head and the block upon disassembly. You must be careful if you use a razor blade to remove this stuff as the head and block are obviously aluminum which is obviously soft, so obviously you could do great damage if you're not careful. Obviously, I attempted to be careful. I found that some steel wool soaked in lacquer thinner did a good job of softening the material and that scrubbing on the surface helped clean it up pretty well. There is much more work to be done, but I'm confident that with time, elbow grease and patience I can get the head and the block cleaned properly.
The pictures at the right show this work as well as the inside of the block now that I've given it a first cleaning. It will get much prettier after I get in there with a wire brush to clean it up.
Ciao!
2.16.2003
Last time I touched the Alfa engine block it was to give it a bath in the solvent tank. With that job now completed I needed to figure out whether or not I was going to remove the cylinder liners. I originally had planned to leave them in as they looked to be in good condition, there was no signs of leakage from the seals, and they were in place pretty well.
After mulling the situation over I decided to pull them out, mostly so that I could clean the passages around the liners at the bottom of the block. There was some pretty heavy corrosion and rust in there and I couldn't see that I'd be able to effectively get it out with the liners in place.
So, with an easy 180 degree rotation of my wonderful AutoComponenti modified engine stand I had the block upside down and was ready to remove the liners.
Some gentle but persistent tapping with a brass drift and a hammer and the liners slowly came out of the block.
Now I'm ready to throughly scrub the block to remove the corrosion and dirt. Then I'll make the decision as to whether or not I'll re-use the liners or buy a complete matched set of liners and pistons.
Ciao!
2.02.2003
For some reason this page got overwritten last week when I updated the site and the pictures of the cleaned engine block were missing. Here then, are the pictures of the engine block looking a lot cleaner after spending some time in the solvent tank.
It was very satisfying to clean off the years of oil and crud that coated the entire engine block. It's looking a little cleaner and a lot nicer now.
My next step will be to remove the liners so that I can clean the area around the studs and the water passages. The liners are in there pretty good, I hope I'm able to get them out without having to resort to a hydraulic press.
Ciao!
5.17.06
Has it really been over two years since I last posted an update on the Alfa? I should be shamed. My punishment should be that I should have to drive a Ford Pinto for the rest of my life.
Alas it has been many moons since I last did much to the Alfa. To bring you up to speed, here's a brief history lesson.
Several years ago I found a local GTV on craigslist for a very low price. I'd always wanted to restore one of these for my wife and despite the fact that I was in graduate school and had a lot of other things going on, we bought the car and towed it home. We actually did get the engine to fire and drove the car for a very brief period.
The car was not in good shape at all. The engine made bad knocking noises which sounded curiously like a big end bearing gone bad, the suspension was completely shot, and the body was in horrible condition. We had no illusions, we knew when we bought it that it would be a complete restoration project, for some day in the future. I pulled the engine out, took it apart, found the bad big end bearing, and carefully boxed up all the parts. The transmission and exhaust and driveline were removed, and the car was stored under a cover in our front yard, awaiting the day when I would get to lay my hands on her and bring her back to life. In the mean time my friend Carl bought and had a 66 GTV restored, which always piqued my interest in the little car. I collected Alfa books and when I wasn't fantasizing about my CSL my thoughts would wander to the GTV. My wife named it Shakespeare and every once in a while we'd pull the cover off to look at the car's lovely shape. Every time I see the car it makes me smile.
Fast forward to 2006. My CSL is not back from paint, the engine's ready to go, and I have some time on my hands and nothing else fun to do. There was space in the garage, so I pushed it up the driveway and in to the garage and began cleaning. I started with the engine compartment, removing wiring, hoses and ancillary equipment still mounted to the fender wells and firewalls. I attacked the interior, removing seats, insulation, and wiring. I removed as much from the car as I could, and over the past two days I've made significant progress.
Make no mistake, this is the tip of the iceberg. It will be years before she's on the road again. There are some pretty serious body issues, not necessarily related to rust, but badly done body repair that has resulted in thick layers of bondo. So far I've found very little rust, which is a nice change (old BMWs were packed in saltwater before they left the factory).
I've restored a lot of old cars in my life, and I must say, that despite some bad bodywork, this car is remarkably original. There haven't been any aggregious attacks on her interior, no 6X9 speaker holes cut in the door panels, no chopped body bits. It will be a lot of work, but what I have to start with is not horrible.
The goal is to have her completely stripped to a bare shell on a rolling dolly sometime this summer. She'll then go to be plastic media blasted and primered so that I can begin the bodywork. When I sold my CS I used some of the funds to equip my workshop with a proper air compressor (5HP, 60 gallon tank IR rated at 12.3 CFM at 120PSI). This thing should handle just about any work I need, including sanding, grinding and painting) and a Millermatic 210 MiG welder (I can also do aluminum).
Over the past couple of days I've been removing seats, wiring, interior, and every part that isn't part of the shell and either boxing it or throwing it away. As you can see from the pictures above, there is a lot to do. The front left fender has been pretty mangled over the years, and is probably going to need to be completely replaced, Ditto for the front clip which has serious amounts of damage. Luckily the rest of the car is not too bad. For the most part it's very clean, with only mild surface rust (for the most part). There are several rust areas which will need to be fixed, but for a nearly 40 year old car that has been sitting a lot over the past ten, she looks pretty good. I can only compare it to my BMW CS/CSL experience and in that light the car is amazing. An E9 BMW would be rusted horribly with this sort of history.
I've been making good use of my Dynabrade angle grinder, and my DA Dynabrade sander. Using 3M sanding discs I've checked several areas of the car and have been happy to find fairly clean metal. So far, so good. There's plenty more work to be done.
Ciao!
9.19.03
It is with great shame that I announce that virtually no progress has been made on the Alfa since the beginning of the summer. The last time I wrote I had been cutting up an old CS body and hauling it off to the recycler. That job is done and the space that it gave us was available for only a brief amount of time.
I had moved the Alfa to the garage in hopes of stripping the body but soon two new projects loomed on the horizon, one for the house, the other for income. The house project is the construction of a retaining wall for our front yard and it's quite a task. All told the wall will be over 40 feet long, involve one 90 degree corner and a nearly 180 degree bend. It will be 4 feet tall and constructed of interlocking cinder blocks. As with many things the bulk of the work is preparation, and with retaining walls preparation involves digging......lots of digging. That project along with my continued studies have robbed the Alfa of attention.
Additionally, I've taken on a project to put together a friend's BMW CSL. Despite the guilt felt over not working on the Alfa I'm hoping some of the funds from the CSL job will help me to acquire some tools (such as a welder) and parts for the Alfa so in the long run it is good for the Alfa. It just makes the Alfa's restoration a longer run.
A month ago we made our annual 40 mile trek south to Laguna Seca for the Historic races and also to the Concorso Italiano. There were lots of pretty Alfas, Ferraris and other Italian marques there as usual. Since I have no pictures of our Alfa that are of interest, I included a couple from the show for you to appreciate. The yellow Fiat 500 belongs to my father Joe. This show was the maiden voyage for the little car following a 2 year restoration. Cute ain't it?
5.17.06
Has it really been over two years since I last posted an update on the Alfa? I should be shamed. My punishment should be that I should have to drive a Ford Pinto for the rest of my life.
Alas it has been many moons since I last did much to the Alfa. To bring you up to speed, here's a brief history lesson.
Several years ago I found a local GTV on craigslist for a very low price. I'd always wanted to restore one of these for my wife and despite the fact that I was in graduate school and had a lot of other things going on, we bought the car and towed it home. We actually did get the engine to fire and drove the car for a very brief period.
The car was not in good shape at all. The engine made bad knocking noises which sounded curiously like a big end bearing gone bad, the suspension was completely shot, and the body was in horrible condition. We had no illusions, we knew when we bought it that it would be a complete restoration project, for some day in the future. I pulled the engine out, took it apart, found the bad big end bearing, and carefully boxed up all the parts. The transmission and exhaust and driveline were removed, and the car was stored under a cover in our front yard, awaiting the day when I would get to lay my hands on her and bring her back to life. In the mean time my friend Carl bought and had a 66 GTV restored, which always piqued my interest in the little car. I collected Alfa books and when I wasn't fantasizing about my CSL my thoughts would wander to the GTV. My wife named it Shakespeare and every once in a while we'd pull the cover off to look at the car's lovely shape. Every time I see the car it makes me smile.
Fast forward to 2006. My CSL is not back from paint, the engine's ready to go, and I have some time on my hands and nothing else fun to do. There was space in the garage, so I pushed it up the driveway and in to the garage and began cleaning. I started with the engine compartment, removing wiring, hoses and ancillary equipment still mounted to the fender wells and firewalls. I attacked the interior, removing seats, insulation, and wiring. I removed as much from the car as I could, and over the past two days I've made significant progress.
Make no mistake, this is the tip of the iceberg. It will be years before she's on the road again. There are some pretty serious body issues, not necessarily related to rust, but badly done body repair that has resulted in thick layers of bondo. So far I've found very little rust, which is a nice change (old BMWs were packed in saltwater before they left the factory).
I've restored a lot of old cars in my life, and I must say, that despite some bad bodywork, this car is remarkably original. There haven't been any aggregious attacks on her interior, no 6X9 speaker holes cut in the door panels, no chopped body bits. It will be a lot of work, but what I have to start with is not horrible.
The goal is to have her completely stripped to a bare shell on a rolling dolly sometime this summer. She'll then go to be plastic media blasted and primered so that I can begin the bodywork. When I sold my CS I used some of the funds to equip my workshop with a proper air compressor (5HP, 60 gallon tank IR rated at 12.3 CFM at 120PSI). This thing should handle just about any work I need, including sanding, grinding and painting) and a Millermatic 210 MiG welder (I can also do aluminum).
Over the past couple of days I've been removing seats, wiring, interior, and every part that isn't part of the shell and either boxing it or throwing it away. As you can see from the pictures above, there is a lot to do. The front left fender has been pretty mangled over the years, and is probably going to need to be completely replaced, Ditto for the front clip which has serious amounts of damage. Luckily the rest of the car is not too bad. For the most part it's very clean, with only mild surface rust (for the most part). There are several rust areas which will need to be fixed, but for a nearly 40 year old car that has been sitting a lot over the past ten, she looks pretty good. I can only compare it to my BMW CS/CSL experience and in that light the car is amazing. An E9 BMW would be rusted horribly with this sort of history.
I've been making good use of my Dynabrade angle grinder, and my DA Dynabrade sander. Using 3M sanding discs I've checked several areas of the car and have been happy to find fairly clean metal. So far, so good. There's plenty more work to be done.
Ciao!
9.19.03
It is with great shame that I announce that virtually no progress has been made on the Alfa since the beginning of the summer. The last time I wrote I had been cutting up an old CS body and hauling it off to the recycler. That job is done and the space that it gave us was available for only a brief amount of time.
I had moved the Alfa to the garage in hopes of stripping the body but soon two new projects loomed on the horizon, one for the house, the other for income. The house project is the construction of a retaining wall for our front yard and it's quite a task. All told the wall will be over 40 feet long, involve one 90 degree corner and a nearly 180 degree bend. It will be 4 feet tall and constructed of interlocking cinder blocks. As with many things the bulk of the work is preparation, and with retaining walls preparation involves digging......lots of digging. That project along with my continued studies have robbed the Alfa of attention.
Additionally, I've taken on a project to put together a friend's BMW CSL. Despite the guilt felt over not working on the Alfa I'm hoping some of the funds from the CSL job will help me to acquire some tools (such as a welder) and parts for the Alfa so in the long run it is good for the Alfa. It just makes the Alfa's restoration a longer run.
A month ago we made our annual 40 mile trek south to Laguna Seca for the Historic races and also to the Concorso Italiano. There were lots of pretty Alfas, Ferraris and other Italian marques there as usual. Since I have no pictures of our Alfa that are of interest, I included a couple from the show for you to appreciate. The yellow Fiat 500 belongs to my father Joe. This show was the maiden voyage for the little car following a 2 year restoration. Cute ain't it?
7.15.03
Work has definitely stalled on the Alfa over the past couple of months. Several work and school-related activities have kept me from getting work done on it. Most significant is my project to finally cut up and discard the smashed CS (affectionately dubbed, "The Hulk") from my yard so that I can make room to work on the Alfa.
I began the process a couple weeks ago, by removing the engine and using an oxy/acetyln torch to cut the old thing up. It was hot out and cutting up a car this way is NASTY work. Every time you hit places that have been undercoated, big black plumes of smoke waft in to your face. To make matters worse, big molten globs of metal fly through the air, usually landing somewhere in your shoe or inside your glove where they burn your skin while you frantically try to remove said article of clothing. It is NOT fun!
After a lot of sweating and a lot of work I'd gotten the car cut up in to some more manageable pieces but we ran out of oxygen before we could finish the job.
With this now accomplished I could put some of the pieces in the bed of my truck and run them to the junkyard to be recycled.
See you all next week!
Ciao!
5.25.2003-Long Time Gone
It has been a long time since I'd spent any time on the Alfa. Spring here in Northern California was one of the wettest on record and that prevented me for accomplishing a lot of things that were necessary in order go play with the Alfa.
Additionally, my pursuit of higher education took me out of the country for a couple weekends. All of this meant no time to work on the Alfa!
This weekend the weather allowed me to move some vehicles around and I was able to get the Alfa in to the garage to begin disassembly.
Despite the fact that our driveway is steep, I was able to push the little car up in to the garage by myself. Of course the engine is out, but it's still impressive to be able to do this.
I wasn't sure where to start. The car needs to be completely taken apart so that it can be media blasted. I need to take the doors off and for this I'll need a impact driver to get the philips head screws that hold the hinges to the door jamb. I started cutting the window gasket out for windshield removal, and also began to remove the interior trim. As you can see from this engine bay shot there is a lot of work to do, and a lot of cleaning as well.
I'm sure it will take many evenings to get the car stripped bare, but what else am I going to do with my time?
See you all next week!
Ciao!
3.23.2003-What a Blast!
This weekend saw some actual work done on the Alfa. I had a box full of engine and transmission mount parts that I removed when I took the engine and gearbox out that were crying out for attention. The paint on them was horrible, they were greasy and bent. The rubber bushes for the transmission cross-member were competely destroyed.
Thanks to my good friend Jon Nichols of Nichols Manufacturing (purveyor of Head-up Displays to the military and lightweight flywheels and clutchbaskets for Ducati owners) I was able to bead blast the box full of parts in his blast cabinet. Having access to this piece of equipment was invaluable when I restored my CS and if I were able to have my pick of home workshop tools a bead blasting cabinet would be right up there with a welder and a plasma cutter. Hopefully someday I'll have one, but in the mean time I'm lucky to have the occasional use of Jon's. The bead blasting made quick work of prepping all the parts for powder coating, and I was even able to use his 50-ton press to remove the wasted bushings.
This week for the first time in a while I have pictures! See the before and after pictures and you'll understand why I think bead blasting is so cool. With a little work these guys will be ready for powdercoating, at which point I'll box them up and store them until the day I'm ready to re-install them on the car.
Saturday also saw the second meeting of the growing local Northern California Alfa/BMW owner's Pose-n-drive session. This event saw the addition of a new face, Mr. Erik Lutkin, whose Silver 74 GTV joined Tom Hardy's 67, Jeff Mc Neill's wonderfully restored 74, and my CS. We met at Alice's Restaurant and after a short pose session we headed out Highway 84 toward the coast. With the exception of a large gaggle of bicyclists whose presence severely limited us for a few miles the roads were clean and clear and we had a nice time swapping the lead. I even got some video of us screaming Westward toward Highway 1. We then headed south on 1 along the coast, and then up through Soquel back to the house for sandwiches and bench racing on the deck.
Perhaps more local Alfisti will come out of the woodwork and we can begin making this a semi-regular event.
Ciao!
3.02.2003-Tapped Out
Follows a tale of two cars, one of Italian origin, long in the tooth and in need of love. The other, much newer and of Teutonic background still requires occasional love (as do all things with wheels and hearts).
My wife's 1997 Z3 had developed an oil leak that continued to get worse as the months passed. By last week the oil slick underneath the engine was starting to get embarrassing. Despite the fact that our garage floor is painted it was getting to be a real drag cleaning up oil every day. Besides that, German cars, new German cars, should just not leak oil.
I decided to find the source of the leak but a floor jack and jack stands did not allow me the perspective I needed to see where the oil was coming from. Last week I stopped by to see my good friends at Independent BMW of Palo Alto to see if they could help me out. With the car on one of their lifts Mike quickly informed me that it was the oil filter housing (huh?). "Costs about $500 including the part", he said. Yikes. I gave him some money for his time and thanked him before getting on my way. Since our car was supposedly still under warranty I decided to take it back to the dealer to have them fix it. Turns out BMW North America knows about this leaking oil filter housing problem. There are service bulletins out on it, and a revised part # that fixes the problems of the old part. I schedule the car for the service and drop it off. Three or four hours later I receive a call from the dealer ungraciously telling me that the car's warranty expired two weeks ago and that they would have to charge me (over $500) for the part and labor. "Sure you will", I thought to myself.
The reason I'm telling you all this is that I spent Saturday morning installing the part myself. That, combined with the other chores and workload on my desk right now prevented me from getting much quality time with the Alfa block, but I did manage to touch it for a little while and effect some positive change. As it turned out, the work on the little Bimmer was not too arduous, and only took 3 hours or so. Modern engines are both fun and frustrating to work on as despite the compact nature of their design, the fasteners and components themselves are usually in good shape and easy to remove. The Z3's alternator has it's own air intake and duct to keep it cool! The oil filter housing itself is something that Alfa Romeo would be proud of. It's cast aluminum, rather pretty for a German part, and rather intricate. It also costs a lot of money. Now the work is done, the car is driveable, and there's no more oil on the garage floor after she leaves.
On to the Alfa. I borrowed a set of Metric taps and dies from my father and am chasing all the threads on the studs and tapped holes in the block. Some of the auxilliary studs are a bit damaged so I'll be replaceing them when the time comes. Once that was done I chucked up a wire brush in a handheld drill and worked on removing the corrosion from the cylinder head studs. I've got some more work to do, but so far the brush does a good job and the studs themselves look great.
Next weekend is a TEMBA weekend and my current coursework is Economic Analysis for Global Business so I'm sure I'll have something fun to talk about next weekend in relating my Bschool learning to Alfa Romeo.
Ciao!
2.23.2003-Don't Stop Cleaning, it's gonna be a car someday
Sadly there is not much in the way of news to report this week. I did move the block back to the solvent tank for another round of cleaning now that the liners are out. I managed to get a lot of the junk that was caked around the inside of the block out and now I'm ready to go at it with a slightly more abrasive media. I'm going to use a wire brush chucked up in an electric drill to clean the corrosion off the studs and on some of the other areas. After that I'll chase all the threads with the appropriate die and get the block cleaned for reassembly. It's pretty much at it's most elemental state right now, there's really nothing else to remove.
I also began removing the head gasket material from the top of the block. This is a trick job because it's important to have a clean and uniform surface for reassembly but one has to be careful the way you remove the old gasket. The Alfa gaskets have a built in adhesive that gets activated with heat in order to seal the head to the block. This results in a rather thick coating of gasket material and glue on the head and the block upon disassembly. You must be careful if you use a razor blade to remove this stuff as the head and block are obviously aluminum which is obviously soft, so obviously you could do great damage if you're not careful. Obviously, I attempted to be careful. I found that some steel wool soaked in lacquer thinner did a good job of softening the material and that scrubbing on the surface helped clean it up pretty well. There is much more work to be done, but I'm confident that with time, elbow grease and patience I can get the head and the block cleaned properly.
The pictures at the right show this work as well as the inside of the block now that I've given it a first cleaning. It will get much prettier after I get in there with a wire brush to clean it up.
Ciao!
2.16.2003
Last time I touched the Alfa engine block it was to give it a bath in the solvent tank. With that job now completed I needed to figure out whether or not I was going to remove the cylinder liners. I originally had planned to leave them in as they looked to be in good condition, there was no signs of leakage from the seals, and they were in place pretty well.
After mulling the situation over I decided to pull them out, mostly so that I could clean the passages around the liners at the bottom of the block. There was some pretty heavy corrosion and rust in there and I couldn't see that I'd be able to effectively get it out with the liners in place.
So, with an easy 180 degree rotation of my wonderful AutoComponenti modified engine stand I had the block upside down and was ready to remove the liners.
Some gentle but persistent tapping with a brass drift and a hammer and the liners slowly came out of the block.
Now I'm ready to throughly scrub the block to remove the corrosion and dirt. Then I'll make the decision as to whether or not I'll re-use the liners or buy a complete matched set of liners and pistons.
Ciao!
5.25.2003-Long Time Gone
It has been a long time since I'd spent any time on the Alfa. Spring here in Northern California was one of the wettest on record and that prevented me for accomplishing a lot of things that were necessary in order go play with the Alfa.
Additionally, my pursuit of higher education took me out of the country for a couple weekends. All of this meant no time to work on the Alfa!
This weekend the weather allowed me to move some vehicles around and I was able to get the Alfa in to the garage to begin disassembly.
Despite the fact that our driveway is steep, I was able to push the little car up in to the garage by myself. Of course the engine is out, but it's still impressive to be able to do this.
I wasn't sure where to start. The car needs to be completely taken apart so that it can be media blasted. I need to take the doors off and for this I'll need a impact driver to get the philips head screws that hold the hinges to the door jamb. I started cutting the window gasket out for windshield removal, and also began to remove the interior trim. As you can see from this engine bay shot there is a lot of work to do, and a lot of cleaning as well.
I'm sure it will take many evenings to get the car stripped bare, but what else am I going to do with my time?
See you all next week!
Ciao!
3.23.2003-What a Blast!
This weekend saw some actual work done on the Alfa. I had a box full of engine and transmission mount parts that I removed when I took the engine and gearbox out that were crying out for attention. The paint on them was horrible, they were greasy and bent. The rubber bushes for the transmission cross-member were competely destroyed.
Thanks to my good friend Jon Nichols of Nichols Manufacturing (purveyor of Head-up Displays to the military and lightweight flywheels and clutchbaskets for Ducati owners) I was able to bead blast the box full of parts in his blast cabinet. Having access to this piece of equipment was invaluable when I restored my CS and if I were able to have my pick of home workshop tools a bead blasting cabinet would be right up there with a welder and a plasma cutter. Hopefully someday I'll have one, but in the mean time I'm lucky to have the occasional use of Jon's. The bead blasting made quick work of prepping all the parts for powder coating, and I was even able to use his 50-ton press to remove the wasted bushings.
This week for the first time in a while I have pictures! See the before and after pictures and you'll understand why I think bead blasting is so cool. With a little work these guys will be ready for powdercoating, at which point I'll box them up and store them until the day I'm ready to re-install them on the car.
Saturday also saw the second meeting of the growing local Northern California Alfa/BMW owner's Pose-n-drive session. This event saw the addition of a new face, Mr. Erik Lutkin, whose Silver 74 GTV joined Tom Hardy's 67, Jeff Mc Neill's wonderfully restored 74, and my CS. We met at Alice's Restaurant and after a short pose session we headed out Highway 84 toward the coast. With the exception of a large gaggle of bicyclists whose presence severely limited us for a few miles the roads were clean and clear and we had a nice time swapping the lead. I even got some video of us screaming Westward toward Highway 1. We then headed south on 1 along the coast, and then up through Soquel back to the house for sandwiches and bench racing on the deck.
Perhaps more local Alfisti will come out of the woodwork and we can begin making this a semi-regular event.
Ciao!
3.02.2003-Tapped Out
Follows a tale of two cars, one of Italian origin, long in the tooth and in need of love. The other, much newer and of Teutonic background still requires occasional love (as do all things with wheels and hearts).
My wife's 1997 Z3 had developed an oil leak that continued to get worse as the months passed. By last week the oil slick underneath the engine was starting to get embarrassing. Despite the fact that our garage floor is painted it was getting to be a real drag cleaning up oil every day. Besides that, German cars, new German cars, should just not leak oil.
I decided to find the source of the leak but a floor jack and jack stands did not allow me the perspective I needed to see where the oil was coming from. Last week I stopped by to see my good friends at Independent BMW of Palo Alto to see if they could help me out. With the car on one of their lifts Mike quickly informed me that it was the oil filter housing (huh?). "Costs about $500 including the part", he said. Yikes. I gave him some money for his time and thanked him before getting on my way. Since our car was supposedly still under warranty I decided to take it back to the dealer to have them fix it. Turns out BMW North America knows about this leaking oil filter housing problem. There are service bulletins out on it, and a revised part # that fixes the problems of the old part. I schedule the car for the service and drop it off. Three or four hours later I receive a call from the dealer ungraciously telling me that the car's warranty expired two weeks ago and that they would have to charge me (over $500) for the part and labor. "Sure you will", I thought to myself.
The reason I'm telling you all this is that I spent Saturday morning installing the part myself. That, combined with the other chores and workload on my desk right now prevented me from getting much quality time with the Alfa block, but I did manage to touch it for a little while and effect some positive change. As it turned out, the work on the little Bimmer was not too arduous, and only took 3 hours or so. Modern engines are both fun and frustrating to work on as despite the compact nature of their design, the fasteners and components themselves are usually in good shape and easy to remove. The Z3's alternator has it's own air intake and duct to keep it cool! The oil filter housing itself is something that Alfa Romeo would be proud of. It's cast aluminum, rather pretty for a German part, and rather intricate. It also costs a lot of money. Now the work is done, the car is driveable, and there's no more oil on the garage floor after she leaves.
On to the Alfa. I borrowed a set of Metric taps and dies from my father and am chasing all the threads on the studs and tapped holes in the block. Some of the auxilliary studs are a bit damaged so I'll be replaceing them when the time comes. Once that was done I chucked up a wire brush in a handheld drill and worked on removing the corrosion from the cylinder head studs. I've got some more work to do, but so far the brush does a good job and the studs themselves look great.
Next weekend is a TEMBA weekend and my current coursework is Economic Analysis for Global Business so I'm sure I'll have something fun to talk about next weekend in relating my Bschool learning to Alfa Romeo.
Ciao!
5.25.2003-Long Time Gone
It has been a long time since I'd spent any time on the Alfa. Spring here in Northern California was one of the wettest on record and that prevented me for accomplishing a lot of things that were necessary in order go play with the Alfa.
Additionally, my pursuit of higher education took me out of the country for a couple weekends. All of this meant no time to work on the Alfa!
This weekend the weather allowed me to move some vehicles around and I was able to get the Alfa in to the garage to begin disassembly.
Despite the fact that our driveway is steep, I was able to push the little car up in to the garage by myself. Of course the engine is out, but it's still impressive to be able to do this.
I wasn't sure where to start. The car needs to be completely taken apart so that it can be media blasted. I need to take the doors off and for this I'll need a impact driver to get the philips head screws that hold the hinges to the door jamb. I started cutting the window gasket out for windshield removal, and also began to remove the interior trim. As you can see from this engine bay shot there is a lot of work to do, and a lot of cleaning as well.
I'm sure it will take many evenings to get the car stripped bare, but what else am I going to do with my time?
See you all next week!
Ciao!
3.23.2003-What a Blast!
This weekend saw some actual work done on the Alfa. I had a box full of engine and transmission mount parts that I removed when I took the engine and gearbox out that were crying out for attention. The paint on them was horrible, they were greasy and bent. The rubber bushes for the transmission cross-member were competely destroyed.
Thanks to my good friend Jon Nichols of Nichols Manufacturing (purveyor of Head-up Displays to the military and lightweight flywheels and clutchbaskets for Ducati owners) I was able to bead blast the box full of parts in his blast cabinet. Having access to this piece of equipment was invaluable when I restored my CS and if I were able to have my pick of home workshop tools a bead blasting cabinet would be right up there with a welder and a plasma cutter. Hopefully someday I'll have one, but in the mean time I'm lucky to have the occasional use of Jon's. The bead blasting made quick work of prepping all the parts for powder coating, and I was even able to use his 50-ton press to remove the wasted bushings.
This week for the first time in a while I have pictures! See the before and after pictures and you'll understand why I think bead blasting is so cool. With a little work these guys will be ready for powdercoating, at which point I'll box them up and store them until the day I'm ready to re-install them on the car.
Saturday also saw the second meeting of the growing local Northern California Alfa/BMW owner's Pose-n-drive session. This event saw the addition of a new face, Mr. Erik Lutkin, whose Silver 74 GTV joined Tom Hardy's 67, Jeff Mc Neill's wonderfully restored 74, and my CS. We met at Alice's Restaurant and after a short pose session we headed out Highway 84 toward the coast. With the exception of a large gaggle of bicyclists whose presence severely limited us for a few miles the roads were clean and clear and we had a nice time swapping the lead. I even got some video of us screaming Westward toward Highway 1. We then headed south on 1 along the coast, and then up through Soquel back to the house for sandwiches and bench racing on the deck.
Perhaps more local Alfisti will come out of the woodwork and we can begin making this a semi-regular event.
Ciao!
5.25.2003-Long Time Gone
It has been a long time since I'd spent any time on the Alfa. Spring here in Northern California was one of the wettest on record and that prevented me for accomplishing a lot of things that were necessary in order go play with the Alfa.
Additionally, my pursuit of higher education took me out of the country for a couple weekends. All of this meant no time to work on the Alfa!
This weekend the weather allowed me to move some vehicles around and I was able to get the Alfa in to the garage to begin disassembly.
Despite the fact that our driveway is steep, I was able to push the little car up in to the garage by myself. Of course the engine is out, but it's still impressive to be able to do this.
I wasn't sure where to start. The car needs to be completely taken apart so that it can be media blasted. I need to take the doors off and for this I'll need a impact driver to get the philips head screws that hold the hinges to the door jamb. I started cutting the window gasket out for windshield removal, and also began to remove the interior trim. As you can see from this engine bay shot there is a lot of work to do, and a lot of cleaning as well.
I'm sure it will take many evenings to get the car stripped bare, but what else am I going to do with my time?
See you all next week!
Ciao!
3.23.2003-What a Blast!
This weekend saw some actual work done on the Alfa. I had a box full of engine and transmission mount parts that I removed when I took the engine and gearbox out that were crying out for attention. The paint on them was horrible, they were greasy and bent. The rubber bushes for the transmission cross-member were competely destroyed.
Thanks to my good friend Jon Nichols of Nichols Manufacturing (purveyor of Head-up Displays to the military and lightweight flywheels and clutchbaskets for Ducati owners) I was able to bead blast the box full of parts in his blast cabinet. Having access to this piece of equipment was invaluable when I restored my CS and if I were able to have my pick of home workshop tools a bead blasting cabinet would be right up there with a welder and a plasma cutter. Hopefully someday I'll have one, but in the mean time I'm lucky to have the occasional use of Jon's. The bead blasting made quick work of prepping all the parts for powder coating, and I was even able to use his 50-ton press to remove the wasted bushings.
This week for the first time in a while I have pictures! See the before and after pictures and you'll understand why I think bead blasting is so cool. With a little work these guys will be ready for powdercoating, at which point I'll box them up and store them until the day I'm ready to re-install them on the car.
Saturday also saw the second meeting of the growing local Northern California Alfa/BMW owner's Pose-n-drive session. This event saw the addition of a new face, Mr. Erik Lutkin, whose Silver 74 GTV joined Tom Hardy's 67, Jeff Mc Neill's wonderfully restored 74, and my CS. We met at Alice's Restaurant and after a short pose session we headed out Highway 84 toward the coast. With the exception of a large gaggle of bicyclists whose presence severely limited us for a few miles the roads were clean and clear and we had a nice time swapping the lead. I even got some video of us screaming Westward toward Highway 1. We then headed south on 1 along the coast, and then up through Soquel back to the house for sandwiches and bench racing on the deck.
Perhaps more local Alfisti will come out of the woodwork and we can begin making this a semi-regular event.
Ciao!
3.02.2003-Tapped Out
Follows a tale of two cars, one of Italian origin, long in the tooth and in need of love. The other, much newer and of Teutonic background still requires occasional love (as do all things with wheels and hearts).
My wife's 1997 Z3 had developed an oil leak that continued to get worse as the months passed. By last week the oil slick underneath the engine was starting to get embarrassing. Despite the fact that our garage floor is painted it was getting to be a real drag cleaning up oil every day. Besides that, German cars, new German cars, should just not leak oil.
I decided to find the source of the leak but a floor jack and jack stands did not allow me the perspective I needed to see where the oil was coming from. Last week I stopped by to see my good friends at Independent BMW of Palo Alto to see if they could help me out. With the car on one of their lifts Mike quickly informed me that it was the oil filter housing (huh?). "Costs about $500 including the part", he said. Yikes. I gave him some money for his time and thanked him before getting on my way. Since our car was supposedly still under warranty I decided to take it back to the dealer to have them fix it. Turns out BMW North America knows about this leaking oil filter housing problem. There are service bulletins out on it, and a revised part # that fixes the problems of the old part. I schedule the car for the service and drop it off. Three or four hours later I receive a call from the dealer ungraciously telling me that the car's warranty expired two weeks ago and that they would have to charge me (over $500) for the part and labor. "Sure you will", I thought to myself.
The reason I'm telling you all this is that I spent Saturday morning installing the part myself. That, combined with the other chores and workload on my desk right now prevented me from getting much quality time with the Alfa block, but I did manage to touch it for a little while and effect some positive change. As it turned out, the work on the little Bimmer was not too arduous, and only took 3 hours or so. Modern engines are both fun and frustrating to work on as despite the compact nature of their design, the fasteners and components themselves are usually in good shape and easy to remove. The Z3's alternator has it's own air intake and duct to keep it cool! The oil filter housing itself is something that Alfa Romeo would be proud of. It's cast aluminum, rather pretty for a German part, and rather intricate. It also costs a lot of money. Now the work is done, the car is driveable, and there's no more oil on the garage floor after she leaves.
On to the Alfa. I borrowed a set of Metric taps and dies from my father and am chasing all the threads on the studs and tapped holes in the block. Some of the auxilliary studs are a bit damaged so I'll be replaceing them when the time comes. Once that was done I chucked up a wire brush in a handheld drill and worked on removing the corrosion from the cylinder head studs. I've got some more work to do, but so far the brush does a good job and the studs themselves look great.
Next weekend is a TEMBA weekend and my current coursework is Economic Analysis for Global Business so I'm sure I'll have something fun to talk about next weekend in relating my Bschool learning to Alfa Romeo.
Ciao!
2.23.2003-Don't Stop Cleaning, it's gonna be a car someday
Sadly there is not much in the way of news to report this week. I did move the block back to the solvent tank for another round of cleaning now that the liners are out. I managed to get a lot of the junk that was caked around the inside of the block out and now I'm ready to go at it with a slightly more abrasive media. I'm going to use a wire brush chucked up in an electric drill to clean the corrosion off the studs and on some of the other areas. After that I'll chase all the threads with the appropriate die and get the block cleaned for reassembly. It's pretty much at it's most elemental state right now, there's really nothing else to remove.
I also began removing the head gasket material from the top of the block. This is a trick job because it's important to have a clean and uniform surface for reassembly but one has to be careful the way you remove the old gasket. The Alfa gaskets have a built in adhesive that gets activated with heat in order to seal the head to the block. This results in a rather thick coating of gasket material and glue on the head and the block upon disassembly. You must be careful if you use a razor blade to remove this stuff as the head and block are obviously aluminum which is obviously soft, so obviously you could do great damage if you're not careful. Obviously, I attempted to be careful. I found that some steel wool soaked in lacquer thinner did a good job of softening the material and that scrubbing on the surface helped clean it up pretty well. There is much more work to be done, but I'm confident that with time, elbow grease and patience I can get the head and the block cleaned properly.
The pictures at the right show this work as well as the inside of the block now that I've given it a first cleaning. It will get much prettier after I get in there with a wire brush to clean it up.
Ciao!
2.16.2003
Last time I touched the Alfa engine block it was to give it a bath in the solvent tank. With that job now completed I needed to figure out whether or not I was going to remove the cylinder liners. I originally had planned to leave them in as they looked to be in good condition, there was no signs of leakage from the seals, and they were in place pretty well.
After mulling the situation over I decided to pull them out, mostly so that I could clean the passages around the liners at the bottom of the block. There was some pretty heavy corrosion and rust in there and I couldn't see that I'd be able to effectively get it out with the liners in place.
So, with an easy 180 degree rotation of my wonderful AutoComponenti modified engine stand I had the block upside down and was ready to remove the liners.
Some gentle but persistent tapping with a brass drift and a hammer and the liners slowly came out of the block.
Now I'm ready to throughly scrub the block to remove the corrosion and dirt. Then I'll make the decision as to whether or not I'll re-use the liners or buy a complete matched set of liners and pistons.
Ciao!
2.02.2003
For some reason this page got overwritten last week when I updated the site and the pictures of the cleaned engine block were missing. Here then, are the pictures of the engine block looking a lot cleaner after spending some time in the solvent tank.
It was very satisfying to clean off the years of oil and crud that coated the entire engine block. It's looking a little cleaner and a lot nicer now.
My next step will be to remove the liners so that I can clean the area around the studs and the water passages. The liners are in there pretty good, I hope I'm able to get them out without having to resort to a hydraulic press.
Ciao!
1.26.2003-Super Bowl Weekend
A lot has been going on in my personal life lately and it's been impacting the amount of time I've been able to spend on the Alfa engine. That's ok by me as this project is not one that I expect to be completed in 12 months. In one week I begin a year-long MBA program and I've been preparing during the evenings rather than spending them in the garage. I have made some progress since last week though.
Last time I left the engine I had most of the con-rod caps off the crank but the crank itself was still in the block, and the pistons were still in the liners. I had not figured out how to pull the number 5 main bearing cap out of its mortised position in the rear of the block, and I had not pulled the front timing gear off the crank. Both of these situations prevented the crank from being removed from the block. I was anxious to get it all apart so that I could begin cleaning the various parts and determining what's needed for re-assembly.
The first thing task I tackled was pulling that number 5 main bearing cap. This turned out to be much easier than expected, and a few taps with a jelly-head hammer got it out far enough that I could just lever it right out without damaging the aluminum.
Moving to the front of the block I again tapped gently on the keyed timing gear and it was soon off too, along with the lower timing chain and the intermediate gear.
With these pieces now off, I could lift the crank out of the block. In doing so I found yet another failed bearing on the number two con-rod. This one had actually fractured in to two pieces. I don't know if this engine was run out of oil or if the oil galleys in the crank were plugged but something sinister definitely fell on the bottom end.
I then discovered that you can in fact push the pistons out of the liners from the bottom and so soon I had all four pistons out of the block. At this point it's now a bare block (with the liners still intact) covered in lots of grease. I'll make sure to get some pictures before and after so you can see all the pieces in their glory. The next step is to get that block in the tank and introduce it to the wonderful cleaning powers of solvent. Then I'll inspect the bores, measure the ring gaps and determine whether or not she needs a new set of liners and pistons.
Check back in a day or so and I should have some pictures posted of these latest results.
Ciao!
1.19.2003-Time out to play
There is not much new to report this week as far as progress on the engine. As you recall, the number three conrod journal is heavily scored due to a bearing failure. The crank has already been ground to 30 thou under standard which is the service limit so I'll need to find a nice 1600cc crank to rebuild the engine. I did tinker a little and removed the helical gear at the end of the crankshaft but I've not yet figured out how to remove the intermediate timing chain gear from the crank. It appears to be pressed on and located by a woodruff key but it's on there pretty tight. I need to consult a workshop manual or the knowledge of someone with experience before I mess something up.
I've met several very interesting and dedicated folks on the Alfa list, two of whom live up the Peninsula from me in San Francisco. After exchanging many emails with them I decided it was imperative that we meet in real life. Last Sunday Glenn Zucca (74 GTV currently undergoing restoration), Tom Hardy (67 GT Veloce, original condition) and Jeff Mc Neill (74 GTV, just finished complete cosmetic restoration), and a BMW CS friend of mine (Kurt Delimon) met at Alice's Restaurant for a "pose and drive" event. Glenn's GTV is inoperative so he met me at my place and together we drove my 1973 BMW 3.5 CS up to Alice's. There, we met Tom, Jeff and Kurt already gracing the parking lot with their beautiful cars. I know that German cars and Italian cars don't really mix, but the CS is saved by the fact that it was based on the previous 3200CS, which was designed by Bertone, who also designed the GTV, so there is a spiritual link. To me there is more than that even as I see a lot of similarities in the design of the two cars. Here are some pictures of the cars in the parking lot that morning.
We left Alice's for a spirited drive through the coastal mountains and stopped by Glenn's house to view his Alfa. From there we headed to my place for more shop talk, Alfa viewing, and lunch. Along the way I was fortunate enough to drive both Tom and Jeff's beautiful cars. Thanks guys!
1.13.2003-Knock Knock........it's your engineHello. This is your engine speaking. I'm afraid someone did not put me together properly and if you don't do something about it soon the parts of me that are supposed to be inside the block my rise up in revolt and project themselves through my lovely aluminum coat. You hear that knocking on acceleration? It's coming from my number three cylinder, specifically the connecting rod bearing in that cylinder. See that picture to the right? It's of the bearing and as you can see, it's not too happy. It appears that I did not get my recommended daily allowance of oil, or perhaps someone installed a faulty bearing because as you can see, the bearing is destroyed. The friction, which not only wore the bearing's soft metal lining completely way also caused enough heat that the bearing itself warped and now does not fit properly in the connecting rod cap. The damage to my crank was not too bad, but I don't know if merely polishing it will do the trick. You may need to grind my crank and it's already been ground two or three times before. If you can safely grind my crank to 040 thou under please do so, otherwise, you may need to find me a new crankshaft. I promise you that if you find the source of the damage and make sure all my oil galleys are clean and obstruction free, and assemble me with loving care I will be happy to provide you with tens of thousands of worry-free miles of service. And the only time I'll ever speak again is to sing my lovely Italian 4 cylinder opera. Yours, The Engine |
1.12.2003-The New Year and Winter DoldrumsThe past month has brought little in the way of Alfa tinkering. The Christmas holidays and my preoccupation with a leaking gearbox in my old BMW CS have prevented me from spending any real quality time with Shakespeare. I was also at a point where I needed to get the engine up off its dolly and on to my engine stand which necessitated an appropriate adaptor. Jim Steck of AutoComponenti makes such an adaptor and I ordered one from him. He too was busy during the holidays and it was just this week that I finally received the adaptor. The workmanship and quality of finish is excellent, better than I could have done myself. It was $35 well spent. With this part now in hand I could bolt it to the block and mount it in the stand. A unique feature of Jim's part is that it picks up the engine mount studs on the right side of the block which then allows the engine to rotate on it's latitudinal axis (rather than longitudinally as with most engine stands). It fits in to a standard Harbor Freight engine stand. I turned the engine upside down and removed the two pieces of the oil pan, the front timing cover, and the oil pump. I also began removing main bearing caps. To me this is the most exciting and interesting part of engine disassembly as you are able at once to determine the relative health of the engine. It's like looking at history. I was not sure what to expect because I had no idea as to the car's maintenance or overhaul records but this engine has definitely been apart before. As you can see from the pictures, the main bearing journals are in very good condition. At this point a regrind seems completely unnecessary although I've not yet mic'd the journals and done a full inspection. The #4 big-end journal (visible in the last picture) is also in good condition. I have not yet removed the rest of the connecting rods, I'm most interested in #3 as I believe that's the source of the knock that the engine was making when you'd rev the throttle from idle. It also appears that some previous owner had the crank's oil galleys tapped for threaded plugs. I was going to do this myself and am happy to see it's already been done. Now I don't need to worry about them falling out in the future. I continue to be impressed with the quality of this engine. It really is a little jewel to work on, if a little dirty. The engine is filthy and the front cover, oil pan and other auxilliary parts all spent lots of time being scrubbed down in the solvent tank. After the first wash they're starting to look more like engine parts and less like junkyard trash. The fins on the lower part of the oil pan are not too badly damaged although you can see where it's hit hard ground before. Dressing them up with a file before it's reinstalled will help appearances a great deal. I plan on installing a sump guard to the car to prevent future damage to this pretty piece. I'm almost ready to remove the crankshaft from the block. I just need to figure out how to pull the gear off the crankshaft and pull the #5 main bearing from its "mortised" place in the rear of the block. Then I should be able to get a clear understanding of not only the crank's health, but also that of the pistons and liners. Hopefully I'll be able to get those tasks completed before the end of next weekend. Ciao! |
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