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.