The Rotisserie (Post # 08)

Time to get back to "current events."   I'll continue with the back-story later.

The bottom of a car is not a pretty sight. Especially after years of all-season daily use in inclement weather and the occasional oil leak or two. How do you get all that grunge off, and what is hiding underneath it? While it may be possible to get it off while lying on your back beneath the car with a scraper in one hand and a can of solvent in the other, take it from me, that gets old in a hurry.

A total restoration requires that the bottom of a car as well as the stripped interior and all the little nooks and crannies must be cleaned and inspected for hidden damage like rust spots on the steel chassis and electrolytic corrsion where the steel and aluminum come into contact with each other. A common practice to make this easier is to separate the chassis from the body and treat each individually. But the Alfatross's hand-made aluminum body could not be separated from its steel chassis without cutting it. So the only option is to treat the body and chassis at the same time on a rotisserie.

 Restorers often use a car rotisserie to take the aggravation out of this important, but often neglected aspect of a restoration. In the case of the Alfatross, we took a page from the playbook of the guys at the car museum in Phoenix who did something similar a few years ago. Instead of attaching the rotisserie to the car's frame, which is the standard practice, they fabricated two brackets inside the body and on top of the frame so they could pass an iron pipe straight through the car from the trunk opening to the grille opening. This resulted in much better balance and control of the car during rotation.  

After obtaining excellent engineering drawings of the brackets from Mr. Jean-Marc Freslon we set about making our own brackets for the Alfatross.  The brackets are pretty simple, but we needed fairly heavy wall material--have you checked out the price of steel these days?   They don't give it away, even scrap!




Dave measuring the shock tower bolt pattern spacing.



The front rotisserie shaft bracket in place temporarily before
final welding and bolting to the engine mounts.



Dave's rear rotisserie shaft bracket in place temporarily before
welding on the base plates and bolting them to the tops of
the shock towers.



Looking straight through the car from the trunk to the front grille
with the two 4 in. pipe sleeves in perfectalignment. The rotisserie
pipe shaft, supported by supports at either end, will run through
the sleeves allowing the body and chassis to rotate around it
for easy access to all surfaces inside and out.

We hope to have the Alfatross up on the rotisserie ready to start the cleaning and inspection phase by this time next week--but we're making this up as we go along, so who knows what we'll find? 

Romancing the Stone (Post # 07)

Cousin Bo was older, married, in Law School, and much more worldly-wise than I.  When he saw I was already infatuated with the car he started romancing the stone.  It was built for racing, he said, popping the hood to reveal the engine room.  I was astounded to see that it was hinged on its leading edge instead of the trailing edge.  Bo explained that this was a sophisticated European racing refinement: if the hood latch let go, the hood would stay closed, unlike the hoods on American cars that would fly back against the windshield and ruin your day.

The engine was small by American standards in the 1960s: just four cylinders and about 120 cubic inches  (1975 cc) displacement.  Under a massive air cleaner box on the intake side were two big dual downdraft Solex carburators and a writhing mass of tubular headers on the exhaust side.  In between were the two cast aluminum overhead cam covers.  A wide-mouthed shroud picked up cool air from outside the engine room and ducted it across the exhaust headers.  I noted the presence of two ignition coils, two fan belts driving the generator and water pump, and two air horns.

Engine room, driver's side.

So want to take it for a spin?  Bo asked, knowing I was already hooked. 

Thirty-two Years Earlier . . . . (Post # 06)

By 1981 I had owned the Alfatross for 12 years, during which time it had morphed in my consciousness from a hot date to an old friend in need of some serious TLC.  It was getting harder to remember what the original fascination was.

When I first laid eyes on it--and became infatuated the way only a teenager can--it was sitting forlornly in the parking lot of an apartment complex in Chapel Hill, home of the University of North Carolina. I had come to try to enroll and the only person I knew there was my older cousin Bo, who owned the car. But the car was what I saw first. It drew me with a kind of fatal attraction. It stood out from the familiar, drab, utilitarian assortment of student motor vehicles like a nugget of gold in a gravel bed--not that I knew what it was! I approached for a closer look.

It was Spartan in its appointments. No fancy chrome do-dads, emblems, or embellishments. It was painted a deep Italian racing red (not that I knew what that was either). The windows were strangely hazy.  I realized they weren't even glass, just some kind of transparent plastic. Through the driver's window I could see that the speedometer went up to 220!  (Only later did it occurr to me that the calibration was in KPH, not MPH, but that's still 132 mph!)  And the door handle was some kind of weird recessed contraption that didn't even look like a door handle. What the . . . .?   I didn't notice the defects, the chipped paint, the dirt, the crazed windows, the rusty wire wheels, or the fact that the dented rear end didn't even have a bumper. All I could see was that it was different in a way that didn't just appeal to me, it ate me up.

How many speedometers go up to 220?!

It wasn't love at first sight.  More like a fatal attraction!   

Every Project Needs a Plan to Deviate from (Post # 05)

How far along are we with this project after 43 years and how do we proceed?  It starts with a list. Actually a spreadsheet detailing the tasks to be performed (organized in categories), their priority, projected cost, who is going to do them, how long it will take, and deadline for completion.  Research is a big time-consumer.  Fortunately, the Alfatross was a very original "numbers matching" car when I bought it so I don't have to spend a lot of time figuring out fundamental things like what color it was painted, what the interior was like, how the battery was mounted, etc.  It even has the original ignition key!


Restored 72-spoke triple laced Borrani "Record" wire wheel
by Cork Adams, Precision Wheel 

Some of the "sub-assemblies" already finished include:

• Wire wheels
• Brake drums
• Brake master cylinder
• Brake cylinders
• Brake lines
• Brake shoes
• Front brake air scoops
• Instruments
• Suspension springs
• Shock absorbers
• Nardi steering wheel
• Generator
• Starter
• Electric fuel pump
• Wiring harness
• PlexiGlas windows
• Re-chroming
• Radiator replacement
• Fuel tank
• Differential



Restored wood-rimmed Nardi steering wheel
by Bruce Crawford, Hardwood Classics





7,000 RPM tach
by North Hollywood Speedometer


• Exhaust system

It sounds like a lot, but there is still a long way to go, including the most difficult, time-consuming, and expensive elements such as engine, body and interior.  The body and frame are the things we have to get started on right away because they are going to eat up a lot of hours and elbow grease!  I borrowed a car rotisserie from my son Dave so we can do a thorough job of cleaning and prepping the frame and body using Dave's soda blaster.  That should make for some dramatic photos later . . . .

But first we have to make special mounting brackets to skewer the Alfatross with an iron pipe, acting as an axle, passing all the way through the body from bow to stern entering from the trunk and exiting though the grille.  Should have some photos of this next week.

Just add Alfa . . .  Rotisserie frame in foreground, nervous
Alfatross in background.

Six Degrees of Separation . . . . (Post # 04)

 Before I go on  to the nuts and bolts aspects of car restoration I have to get something  else out of the way as soon as possible.  I hope that one of the constructive ways this blog can help me is with my search for the previous owners of the Alfatross.  Their input could be critical for the ongoing nuts and bolts work.  But where do you even start such a search? 

There used to be “six degrees of separation” between you and anyone else on the planet.  Now there are only two: you to the Internet and the Internet to whomever you’re separated from.  Case in point: I have the original license plates for the Alfatross.  In 1989 I contacted a guy in Italy who does plate traces and Bingo! He sent me a photocopy of the registration for the Alfatross when it was first purchased in 1955. 

The Alfatross's original license plated from 1955

It showed that Dr. Alessandro Costantini Brancadoro of San Benedetto del Tronto was the first owner.  I searched for Sr. Brancadoro on Google only to find his obituary, published in 2009.  Bummer.  If I had searched a few years earlier I might have been able to speak to him in person!  But all was not lost.  The obituary contained critical information that I could use to continue the search.  He was a famous heart surgeon and important community member of San Benedetto. 

I know you can't read this.  The original photocopy is dark
and the handwriting is very difficult to read anyway.

Here’s where the two degrees of separation comes in: I looked up the City Council of San Benedetto and wrote to the President, Sr. Marco Calvaresi on New Year’s Eve.  Two days later I got a reply.  It turns out that Sr. Calvaresi is a friend of Dr. Brancadoro’s grandson, Giuseppe, and he graciously supplied contact information.  I immediately wrote to him, asking if anyone in the family remembered the car.  Were there any photos of Dr. Brancadoro and his Alfa together? 

Giuseppe wrote back just as quickly to say that yes, he thought there are some photos of his grandfather and the Alfa.  He would look for them, scan them, and send them to me—if he can find them.  My fingers are crossed! 

So Dr. Costantini Brancadoro was the first owner.  The license plate trace also revealed that he sold the Alfatross to a Carl Joseph Michels in 1957.  Michels address was Jamaica, New York and he may have been in the US military.  After that the trail gets faint and it seems the car changed hands frequently.  I think the third owner was Will Henderson of Flint Michigan and the fourth was Paul Turner from the Chicago area.  I corresponded with the fifth owner, Pat Braden, now deceased, sporatically up to 2002.  He provided a wealth of information about the car's history.   If anyone out there knows Michels, Henderson, or Turner, please get in touch with me or leave a comment! 

Every Car Needs a Name (Post # 03)

"It's the 'Alfatross!' KC said, referring to the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, written about 200 years ago.  OK, if you're the average gearhead, already poised to continue surfing, bear with me a few more lines because this is the best place to start what will (I hope) turn out to be an entertaining and possibly even instructive account of how an ignorant kid from the hills of North Carolina (me) blundered into possession of an old car that is now, 43 years later, increasing in value faster than shares of Apple. 

This is not a blog about how smart I am to have ended up with this car.  Or how I paid a "marque specialist" a ton of money to research and restore it.  Or how important it is to Alfa Romeo heritage or to classic 1950s sports cars in general.  It is about the inexplicable, visceral attraction such cars have on people (OK, mostly men) and why gearheads go to such great lengths to keep them alive. 

But first, back to the 'Alfatross.'  In the poem, The Mariner, a sailor, shoots an albatross--a most remarkable sea bird about which we will  hear more later--and is castigated by the superstitious crew who believe that the albatross brings safe voyage to a ship at sea.  But when there are no immediate bad consequences the crew changes it's mind and praises the Mariner instead . . . .  Until the ship becomes becalmed, inspiring the immortal lines "Water, water, everywhere, but not a drop to drink/ Water, water, everywhere, and all the boards did shrink."  At that point Coleridge's poem and my story come together because the doomed crew tie the dead albatross around the Mariner's neck to punish him for the crime of killing it. 

So in case you haven't figured it out already, the 'Alfatross' KC was referring to in the first line is my 1955 Alfa Romeo 1900 C SSZ.  Only none of us knew what it was at the time.   It might also be instructive to mention that Coleridge was a life-long cocaine addict and author of  another one of the trippiest poems of all time, Kubla Khan.

Back to the car:  classmate KC's single word 'Alfatross' captured perfectly the scene before her.  There I was,  grease-monkey-in-training and penniless graduate student with my buddy, Bob, hoisting the engine out of what she perceived to be a burdensome wreck of an old car with foggy windows and peeling paint when we should have been in the university's library or laboratory bettering ourselves.  To her the old car was the 'Alfatross' around my neck, punishment for some heinous crime committed in the past.  To me,  at that point (1981) it was a vague, partially remembered dream.

The Shed (Post # 02)

Things got busy after moving the Alfatross to New Mexico.  I lost my momentum on the restoration project but I did manage to build a workshop expressly for working on it and other cars accumulated along the way.  To be clear, I am not a collector.  I just can't bear to part with a car that I've had more than 5 years.  In fact, I've still got that old 1973 VW transporter that I used to tow the Alfatross around for the first 20 years. 

Easing the Alfatross into its new home in Santa Fe.

Now I finally had the place to finish restoration of the Alfatross--but I still didn't have the time!  There was no end of distractions, of other ways to spend time and money.  Until 2012.  Two thousand twelve was The Year of Resolutions for my wife and I.  The year that we finally consolidated all our stuff  that had been spread out from North Carolina to Texas to New Mexico in one place.  It was time to concentrate on the Alfatross. 


Day One in "The Shed"

In December 2012 I was contacted by two different parties within days of each other who wanted to buy my car.  Both  needed a Zagato-bodied Alfa Romeo 1900 to add to their collections and both had been looking for such a car for more than a year.  It slowly dawned on me that I had the car, the workshop, the time, and now buyers.  Could 2013 be the year I free myself at last of the Alfatross?  That revelation was the genesis of this blog.  Starting January 1, 2013,  I am going to do my best to finish the restoration this year and document my 44 years of its ownership over the next 52 weeks. 

In the Beginning . . . (Post # 01)

The 1955 1900C SSZ Alfa Romeo I bought in 1969 (AKA "The Alfatross") has been likened to the albatross tied around the neck of  the hapless sailor in Rime of the Ancient Mariner.  It hasn't been easy to keep these 43 years.  When I bought it for $770 it was a really bad idea because it was an object that had bottomed out in value.  It was virtually worthless.  It was still a bad idea a few years later when I towed it from Chapel Hill, to Hendersonville, NC to store it at my parents' place (much to their dismay).  It was an even worse idea in 1979 when I towed it from Hendersonville to College Station, Texas--a distance of about 1,200 miles--behind my 65 hp VW transporter, camping along the way.

Moving the Alfattross from North Carolina to Texas in 1979.

It was only in the 1980's, when I was a graduate student at Texas A&M University, that I actually began to research its history and make the first efforts toward restoration.  It was probably a good thing that the subject I was studying was archaeology, because that science has a lot in common with car restoration.  In fact, you could even call it CARchaeology.  An old car is an assemblage of artifacts, each one of which tells a story.  To get the whole story you have to be very careful how you proceed with its restoration. 

The car is like an archaeological site.  As a site is excavated every artifact is photographed, numbered and located on the site plan.  Cars are disassembled and parts documented in the same way.  Artifacts are cleaned and stabilized, car parts get the same treatment.  Sometimes the most seemingly insignificant artifacts hold the key to understanding the site, and so it is with the wear patterns on camshafts, traces of paint in door jams, faint serial numbers in obscure places.  In the end, all the painstaking documentation enables the archaeologist or Carchaeologist to reassemble the site or old car exactly as it was originally. 

I did a lot of work and research on the car while in Texas, moving it from College Station to Dallas to Corpus Christi over a period of about 25 years.  When it came time to move it from Corpus to New Mexico it was disassembled down to just its frame and aluminum body mounted on a tall trolley.  It couldn't be towed anymore, so  Bob and I dragged it inside a U-Haul truck and drove it 1,000 miles to Santa Fe, NM. 



Moving the Alfatross from Texas to New Mexico in 2010.