Monkey Wrenches (Post # 109)

By now there must be some people out there wondering "If it was good enough to place third in the "Coachwork by Zagato" class at the Arizona Concours d'Elegance in January, why are you still working on The Alfatross?"  My excuse is that it really doesn't take that much to put a car on the lawn: If it is a rare "Italian Exotic", runs well enough to cover a mile or two, has a shiny new coat of paint, fresh upholstery, and been under the same ownership for the last 47 years--that's good enough.  But not as good as it can be.  What we're doing now is making The Alfatross as good as it can be, and that takes a lot more work.

Who Knows Where the Time Goes?

I do, at least when it comes to the restoration of this particular vehicle!  The superb paint and bodywork done by Tim Marinos of Vintage Autocraft was finished 8 months ago. The excellent interior work done by Derrick Dunbar at Paul Russell and Co. was finished 6 months ago. We got the engine back from DeWayne Samuels at Samuels Speed Technologies 4 months ago.  Those three operations probably consumed on the order of 3,000 hours of other people's time and the results were well worth it. Ever since the body, interior, and engine were reunited at The Shed in January it has been up to us to get all those elements to fit together, and it hasn't been easy. Many of the things we did to get the car ready for the Arizona Concours have been undone and redone several times to achieve a better fit and finish.

Why Things Don't Fit

It appears that there are at least three different reasons why, even after a careful restoration, things don't fit:

1. They never fit in the first place (quality control didn't exist in 1955),

2. Original parts that did fit originally got bent, worn, or corroded over the last 61 years (imagine that!), and

3. The process of restoration interfered with the original fit (unintended consequences).

Welcome to My World

The hole for the toggle switch on the far right was made
too close to the lip on the underside of the dash, preventing
it from being oriented to match the others.  Now they look
the way they are supposed to. 

Here are three examples of where the time goes as a result of things not fitting:

Switches

The Alfatross has 6 toggle switches mounted under the dash where it turns from vertical to horizontal. Four of them fit so that the toggles are oriented to be "on" when their toggles are in the "up" position.  The mounting holes for the other two switches were drilled a couple of millimeters too close to the upward turning lip at the back of the dashboard so they sit cockeyed and look glaringly "wrong". This was the way they came from the Zagato factory. For the Arizona Concours we reinstalled them crooked to save time. Now that we are taking the time to do things right, I shaved a couple of millimeters off the backs of the two recalcitrant switches to make them fit the way they were supposed to 61 years ago. I don't think Ugo Zagato would disapprove.

Brake Lines

The Alfatross was taken off the road in 1971 when one of the metal brake lines rusted through and let all the fluid out. But the rest of the lines looked good after cleaning them inside and out and re-tapping the old flare connections. Deducing that it would be faster and more authentic to reuse as many of the old brake lines and flare connections as possible, I decided to replace all the small metal brake lines on the backs of the front wheels and on top of the rear axle, but to keep the larger diameter lines from the reservoir to the master cylinder and from the master cylinder to the front wheels and rear axle. 

Bad decision: This tiny hole in the longest brake line on
the car resulted in hours of additional, unnecessary work.

Bad decision.  I should have just replaced all the lines and connections with new ones.  After installing the original line from the master cylinder to the rear axle--the longest brake line on the car--it leaked, necessitating cleaning up a big mess, making another line, and buying two more bottles of fluid! 

It's the little things: The dash warning light that indicates
the heater fan is operating did not work until I realized
that paint was keeping its housing from grounding  inside
the hole it fits into.

Electrical Gremlins

The Alfatross has a new electrical harness made by YnZ Yesterday's Parts. It is supposedly a copy of the original harness which I removed and sent to them. Even though The Alfatross' electrical system is about as simple as one can get, wires can get crossed, labels can fall off, and ground wires can fail to make contact with the chassis due to the buildup of primer and paint. Getting the wiring right can be a hit-or-miss proposition.

YnZ's harness came with numbered wires and 3 sheets of instructions describing what the wires connected to, but there were problems, including the fact that some of the wires mentioned in the instructions didn't exist.  Fortunately, I also had the Alfa factory wiring schematics and a beautiful set of 9 drawings by Hans Josefsson, (owner of chassis 01977) segregating the circuits by function (starting, charging, lights, signalling, service, etc.).  

So rewiring The Alfatross should be a slam dunk . . . except that the schematics don't agree on a lot of important details.  Add to that the fact that the Alfatross has some extra circuits  not mentioned in any of the schematics. Given the simplicity of the car's electrical system, none of this is a big problem, it just means that some circuits have to be modified, eliminated, or added.  And that takes a lot of time.

The simple drawing accompanying YnZ 's replicated wiring harness shows  wires that don't exist in the instructions and the instructions mention wires and connections that don't show in the drawing.!

The answer to the question of why is it taking so long is that putting a 61 year-old, hand-made, unique Italian Exotic back together is not like putting a new, mass-produced, cloned, modern car together. There's a surprise around every corner. How long is it supposed to take?  Nobody knows.  They're all different . . . .

If You Build It, They Will Come (Post # 108)

It may look deserted here, but for one day a year this 60 mile stretch of Texas Highway 285 is the scene of  the "most challenging  road race in the world".  Richard Coberly.

A funny thing happened in New Guinea after World War II. Airplane effigies made from sticks and grass began appearing in clearings in the jungle. Investigators discovered that local tribesmen made the clearings and built the "airplanes" in the mistaken belief that they would bring back the halcyon days of WWII when airstrips built by the combatants supplied them with tons of "cargo"--their first taste of foodstuffs and luxuries from the outside world. Anthropologists called them "cargo cults", but you can think of it as the belief that "If you build it, they will come."  

Cargo cult, New Guinea  style.  

A Car-Go Cult Thrives in the Desert

About 20 years ago some folks in the vast, empty expanse of West Texas south of I-10 decided to establish their own "car-go" cult.  They arranged to have a 60 mile stretch of highway 285 between Ft. Stockton and Sanderson closed to traffic for a day and invited people to see how fast they could cover the 120 mile distance there and back. It worked! People came from all over and have kept coming ever since. Today it is billed as "The most challenging road race in the world."

Car-Go Cult, West Texas style.

The Alfatross and its siblings were created to be Grand Touring cars that you could drive all week and race on the weekends. As such, they all aspired to run in the most famous endurance road race of the period, the Mille Miglia (MM), one lap over a 1,000 mile course over Italian public highways. In fact, Alfa Romeo won more of these races than any other manufacturer. In 1956, the first year The Alfatross was eligible to run in the MM, 23 Alfa 1900s and 3 1900 Zagatos were entered.  Sadly, The Alfatross was not among them. Discontinued in 1957, there has been nothing like the MM since then (the modern MM is a completely different time/speed/distance rally) for classic and vintage cars built before 1957. 

Tech inspection takes 2 days.  They're looking for safety
rule compliance mainly because race classes are based on
target speed, not engine type, displacement or vehicle
modifications.

But what was the REAL MM like in?  To find the answer to that question we packed ourselves off to Ft. Stockton last weekend on the 60th anniversary of the 1956 MM to savor the 2016 Big Bend Open Road Race (BBORR), one of only four such races in the United States. 

Most entries were road-registered and driven to
the BBORR by their owners.  Others, like this example, were
trailered.

OK, I admit that it's kind of a stretch to compare the original 1,000 mile 1950s Italian national event with the little-known 120 mile race in Texas in 2016, and I doubt if any of the contestants we met made the a connection with the MM, but I saw some revealing parallels.

I was surprised at how few Italian exotics were present.
American supercars such as late-model Corvettes, Vipers,
Cobra replicas, and Chargers were the weapons of choice. 

At least two of these Radicals showed up.  I never found 
out how they did.

First of all, the MM was apparently open to the public, subject to an entry fee and some kind of inspection. None of the sources I consulted even mentioned how the organizers made the cut back then, but I do know that 534 cars divided into 12 classes made it to the starting line for the 1955 MM. 

Sure, some of them were factory entries, but most were probably driven by their owners who were wannabe racer gearheads. Given the length of the race, navigators were allowed in addition to the drivers. The vehicles ranged from the sublime, like the Mercedes 300 SLR driven by winner Stirling Moss, to the ridiculous, like the Fiat 600 of Osvaldo Pierie that finished 273rd. Cars were released at one minute intervals to lessen congestion on the roads. The simple goal was was to get to the finish line as fast as possible.

What I observed at the BBORR was essentially the same thing: Open to the public, entry fee, inspection, a limit on the number of entrants, wide disparity between vehicle and driver capabilities, navigators allowed, and cars released one at a time in sequence with the fastest cars going first. In 2015, the last year for which results are published, there were 158 cars divided into 16 classes. For cars in the "Unlimited" class the race was just like the MM: no upper speed limit, just cover the distance as fast as possible. The other classes, Super Sport, Grand Sport, Grand Touring, Touring, and Street Rod, were not defined by type of vehicle or engine displacement, but on the maintenance of a target speed ranging from 85 to 130 mph. For those classes it was more of a time/distance/speed rally than a race against the clock.

During the MM the course was lined by hundreds of thousands of spectators in towns and roadsides along the route cheering the cars as they blasted by. The BBORR has none of that. Unless you are driving or navigating there isn't much to see of the actual race. Public safety concerns killed the MM following a bad accident involving spectators in 1957, and the BBORR organizers are not taking any chances on suffering the same fate. Highway 285 is closed to traffic during the race and the only people who get to see the cars at speed are the official roadside monitors who note the passing of each car, record speeds, and deal with breakdowns.

In 1955, the year The Alfatross was produced, Stirling Moss set the all-time record covering the 1,000 miles  with an average speed of 157.650 kph (97.96 mph).  In 2015 Larry Robinson won the BBORR with an average speed of 250.543 kph--155.680 mph!

The rest of us have to be content gawking at the cars and schmoozing with the entrants during the tech inspections and car shows held in Ft. Stockton's Rooney Park before and after the race.  And you can drive the course all you want the other 364 days a year and dream about what it would be like to do it at 155 mph!

This race is for REAL!  In the 1956 MM there were 13 accidents, 3 of which were fatal.  Modern safety equipment and the absence of spectators meant the driver of this vehicle walked away with nothing worse than a bruised wallet.

Having driven her entry all the way from Santa Fe Toni was shocked when it was disqualified over safety concerns.