Of bearings and body trim

It's been a while since I posted last (I hate it when life gets in the way of working in the garage) but the last time I posted I was facing some questions around my main bearings and why they didn't have holes that matched the holes in the main bearing saddles in the engine block.

Engine

It turns out that the 1600cc Alfa engine did not come from the factory with the number 2 and 4 main bearing saddles drilled. This was apparently a common upgrade and intended to supply more oil to the crank in racing situations. As this car will never be raced, and because the questionable nature of this upgrade in the first place, I will leave the bearings the way they are and not drill them to match the holes in the saddles. The Alfa engine is a strong and reliable unit and hundreds of thousands of them were made that ran for years without this modification.

I'm hoping to actually be able to assemble the bottom end sometime soon. Another of the challenges I've had is finding the right fasteners for the bottom end, as Alfa originally used some thin "tin" jam nuts, which are NLA. The common wisdom is to use Loctite instead, something I don't have a problem with.

Yesterday we drove up the peninsula to get a couple more engine components back from the machine shop, including the oil pan, valve cover and intake manifold, all of which were disassembled, bead blasted and hot tanked. They look beautiful and are ready for assembly.

Body

I continue to strip the body shell of paint and trim pieces. This job seems never ending but I finally managed to remove the last of the stainless steel trim that surrounds the windows and drip rail. The trim is held in with very small metal screws, a couple of which had rusted so badly that I could not remove them with a screw driver. I had to drill a couple of them out, which is always tricky because you don't want to enlarge the original hole, which would then require using a larger fastener when you're ready for reassembly. I still have much stripping to do, but the exterior of the shell is 98% done.