Follow the Numbers (Post #97)

The Stone Age

If The Alfatross had a memory, what would it remember? Would it remember its first owner who bought it off the Rotondi Milano showroom floor exactly 60 years ago on November 29th, 1955? Would it remember being a flashy new red sports car and all the attention that comes with that? 

Now a Citroen garage, this is the Rotondi address in Milano
where The Alfatross met its first owner on November 29th,
 1955--exactly 60 years ago as I write this.  

Or the second owner, who seems to have been an American serviceman? Maybe it's memory would be like mine: selective. Maybe it would prefer to forget the voyage across the Atlantic, the surprise and humiliation of being abandoned on the dock in New York when the owner did not show up to claim it. Then the years of benign neglect and abuse passing through the hands of four more owners until it ended up with me in 1969. Then even more neglect coupled with a lot of travel until 2013. But cars can't talk, so we'll never know.

Or maybe they do, if you listen closely, and when they do, they say volumes. 
I know a little about those early years only because The Alfatross still proudly bore its long out-of-date Italian license plates when it came to me in 1969.

The front plate before restoration.  Note the heavy dents distorting the letters embossed into the thin aluminum plate.

Of course I wondered where it came from and where it had been during the 14 preceeding years, but there wasn't much to go on. Alfa Romeos were rare in the US, and Zagato bodies--well, they may as well have been UFOs! It took me a long time to realize that the Italian plates were more than just exotic curiosities. In actuality, they were the only link to the car's early history. 

The larger, heavier, steel rear plate  after stripping but before restoration.

The Enlightenment

In 2004 I wrote to the Automobile Club d'Italia requesting an ownership trace using the numbers and letters on the plates. In due course I received a letter with a photocopy of a document recording the sale of The Alfatross by its first owner, Alessandro Costantini Brancadoro, to its second owner, Carl Joseph Michels in 1957, and issuing the new plates.

The official Automobile Club d'Italia registration created when The Alfatross was sold to its second owner, who lists his residence as Jamaica, NY. He shipped it to the US, but something happened and he did not show up to claim it when it arrived.

The Dark Ages

I'm still working on sorting out what happened after that, but all I have are the reminiscences of The Alfatross' fifth owner, Pat Braden.  According to Pat, Will Henderson was the lucky guy who drove off the dock in The Alfatross that day, not Carl Michels. We traced Will to Flint, Michigan, but the trail went cold.  The same thing happened with the next owner, Paul Turner, whose name shows up on some of the tools in the tool kit.  He was a Chicagoan at the very time when the Alfa Romeo Owners' Club was formed there, but even with the Internet's powerful locator tools . . . "so many Paul Turners, so little time . . ."     

The Renaissance

Fast forward to 2015. I stop to get gas.  A pickup pulls up behind me with a nicely-restored Model A Ford on a flatbed trailer.  I look it over and notice that the period license plates look like new.  So I approach the driver and ask him who restored them?  Enthusiastically, he tells me that he's a member of a Model A club in Texas and all the members get their plates done by one or the other of two guys who live in the area, and he whips out a notebook and gives me the contact information for both. As he drove off, I realized I never even caught his name.

And that's how I ended up calling Mr. Sonny Lewis. Restoring old plates is such an unusual craft I couldn't help but ask how he learned it. "In Huntsville!" he cheerfully replied (Huntsville is an infamous Texas State Prison).  Then, after a pregnant pause, "Just kidding!"

I learned a lot about what it takes to restore a license plate in the next few minutes and sent him mine the next day. He goes down in my book as one of the best, most competent contractors The Alfatross has worked with.

The front aluminum plate after restoration by Sonny Lewis.

The rear steel plate after restoration by Sonny Lewis. The hole in the center allows access to the push-button rear trunk lock release.

. . . But Not for Long (Post # 96)

After a two-year sojourn to Tennessee the Alfatross returns to Santa Fe . . . but not for long. We have 12 days to get it ready to go to Paul Russell and Co. for the interior. Should be more than enough time, we thought. All we have to do is put the transmission and transmission covers in, run the wiring harness from the dash to the trunk, attach the suspension springs and members, insert the steering column and drag links, hook up the parking brake, and put the wheels on.  The front and rear suspension members have already been assembled and we have an hydraulic lift to safely raise and lower the chassis. How long can it possibly take?

The front and rear suspension assemblies were prepared weeks in advance, but fitting them to the chassis is not a "plug and play" no-brainer!

Preparing to install the transmission through the passenger
side door.

Putting the transmission in is the easiest job, so we tackle that first. It's heavy and has to go through the passenger's door. We can't put the trans in if the car is on the lift because the lift blocks the passenger's door, so we leave the car on the trolley from Tim's shop. We have an engine hoist, so no problem . . . except that the hoist is too tall so we can't actually get the trans in all the way. Then we discover that the opening in the firewall is too small for the bell housing to pass through into the engine bay. So, take it out, scratch heads, ponder, take the bell housing off to get the trans in and reattach the bell housing from inside the engine bay. An elegant solution, but it still took about three times longer than anticipated.

OK Dave, hold that transmission in place while I get my camera. Now where did I put that thing?

Once in place, the transmission and drive train take a big bite
out of the interior space.

Then we attack the rear axle. A motorcycle jack makes positioning it under the chassis easy, but when we lower the chassis we discover that the aluminum body with no interior or engine is so light we can't compress the springs far enough to attach the drop stop straps,  even after loading 300 pounds of lead in the interior! This is how a job that was anticipated to take a few hours stretches out to take 3 days. It might have taken longer if Andre von Reiter, my next door neighbor had not dropped by to check on The Alfatross.  He immediately saw what was needed and returned with a nifty spring compressor unlike anything I had ever seen before, but it was perfect for the job. 

Now the car is on the lift and the idea is to use the motorcycle jack in conjunction with the car lift to put the two together.

The four all-thread rods attached to the lower
A-arm and the lower spring plate.

Then on to the more complicated front suspension and steering full of more surprises. Again the car is too light to use a floor jack to compress the front springs but this time there is no way to put extra weight over the suspension in the engine bay. We were rather proud of ourselves when we solved this problem by using the lower spring plate itself to do the compressing against the upper spring cavity in the chassis.

We cut four 8 inch lengths of all-thread rod to connect the four holes in the lower A-arm with the four holes in the lower spring plate. With nuts and washers at each end we shortened each rod incrementally until the lower spring plate was in contact with the bottom of the lower A-arm, then began to replace each all-thread rod with the proper bolt to hold the plate in place.  That's when we remembered that there are fat aluminum spacers that are supposed to fit between the lower spring plate and the lower A-arm--and realized we were thinking only two moves ahead when we should have been thinking three.  So it all had to be done again. Maybe this is where "third time's the charm" comes from?

Now the all-thread rods  have compressed the spring and
been replaced by the proper bolts.  Note the thick aluminum
washers between the lower A-arm and the spring plate.

A couple of days later--too late to do any good--I remembered that the Alfa 1900 workshop manual had several pages of workshop illustrations of special tools needed to work on these cars.  Sure enough, at the back of the manual under the heading "Attrezzi di Dotazione e Speciali" was an illustration of a tool that works the same as the one we devised but with a single central tightening screw to ensure that the lower spring plate stays parallel to the bottom of the lower a-arm.

When all else fails . .  read the directions!

The refined version of the spring compressor for the front suspension is item #7, "tool for mounting the spring on the suspension arms"

The Alfatross Comes Home to Roost . . . (Post # 95)

After a sojourn of almost 24 months The Alfatross is finally back home again. Dave Carrell loaned me his Dodge Ram 2500 diesel pickup for the 2,500-mile round trip from Santa Fe to Vintage Autocraft in Lebanon, TN. I drove the trip out solo, then Dave flew in to co-drive the rig back to Santa Fe. The trip was largely uneventful, except for a big, violent wind and rain storm spanning most of Oklahoma.

It's finally finished! For the long trip back to Santa Fe in its Trailer, we took the wheels off
the Alfatross' dolly and bolted it to the floor.

I got the feeling that Tim would rather have had more time to work on fitting the windows and doors, but now that we are committed to showing The Alfatross at the Arizona Concours d'Elegance in Scottsdale in January, we are running short on time.  It is necessary to get the car to Paul Russell & Co. as soon as we can in order to get the interior installed--a process that will take several weeks.  But first we have to get it to Santa Fe to install the suspension, wheels, steering, etc., so it can be shipped via a commercial vehicle transporter. The plan is to get the car back to Santa Fe early in December, which will give us about 50 days to finish it.

The car and the craftsman, Tim Marinos, at the Vintage Autocraft shop in Lebanon, TN.

Robert and David packing the delicate, irreplaceable trim.

Loading up for the 1,260-mile return trip to Santa Fe.  I was amazed that the price for diesel fuel was at the bottom of its range across all 5 states we crossed.  The Ram's 30+ gallon fuel tank gave it a range of almost 500 miles without a load.  The trailer cut that down by half! 

Back home without a scratch after a 5-day, 2,500-mile whirlwind trip!

On to the next phase: add the suspension, wiring harness, steering, transmission, parking brake, etc. We're about to find out that's a lot easier said than done!