I'm going to split this post between the past and the present. If you don't care about the Alfatross's past, just skip down to what's going on in the present:
The rotisserie is together now. The rotisserie heads had to be modified to accept the ends of the steel pipe "axle" and the axle is now fitted to the rotisserie. But the hardest part still lies ahead: mating it to the car. This will take some time and muscle and we can't rush it. The front and rear brackets are in place and tack welded. The alignment of the brackets with the parts of the car's body and frame that the pipe threads through has been checked with a lightweight PVC pipe mock-up. We attached a cradle to the wooden "bumper" in front of the grill opening to protect if from damage. This is where the pipe axle comes closest to the Alfatross's fragile aluminum body. Everything looks OK. But the devil is in the details. There are lots of ways this could go south in a hurry.
In the image above you can see that the PVC test pipe angles downward from back to front. This is necessary to clear the firewall opening in the Alfatross's steel frame. Because the axle must remain parallel to the floor, it means elevating the front of the car before we can run the axle through it. The trolley the car sits on is going to interfere with the lower part of the rotisserie frame while this operation is going on.
Any ideas?
Rewind to 1969
My relationship with the Alfatross began it progression through
the 6 well-known phases of every car restoration project:
1.
Enthusiasm
2.
Disillusionment
3.
Panic
4.
Search for the guilty
5.
Punishment for the participants
6.
Praise and honor for the non-participants
The Enthusiasm stage passed all too quickly, swept away by
the four horsemen of the apoCARalypse:
Insurance, Registration, Repairs, and Maintenance. I had another vehicle, fortunately, so I did
not have to depend on the Alfatross for reliable transportation. In between increasingly rare outings with the
car I started looking at some of the papers that Cousin Bo had given me related
to its history. I was particularly curious about its previous owners. An old advertisement showed it was for sale by the guy who owned it before Bo, Pat Braden, in 1965. I deduced that must have been about when Bo bought it. But the intervening years
between 1955 and 1965 were a complete blank. A receipt showed that Bo had the car repainted in 1967.
There were a few other tantalizing clues about the
Alfatross’s history: A wrench in the
toolkit bore the name “Paul Turner” A sketch on a wrinkled, smudged scrap of
paper showed an emblem that the car had once borne. Another scrap was a crude tracing of the number “2000 SSZ” in flowing
script that had been painted on the lower right corner of the trunk lid. Both these markings were eradicated during the repaint. They were Greek to me, but at least I had a record of what they looked like.
 |
| Sketch of strange emblem painted on front fender |
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| Crude tracing of emblem painted on trunk |
Fast Forward to 2013
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| Assembled rotisserie in foreground is just under 20 ft long! |
Any ideas?
