Keels & Wheels (Post # 128)

The first weekend in May, Toni and I received an invitation from our good friends Richard and Ronnie to visit them in Kemah, Texas.  The main reason was to attend the 23rd annual Keels and Wheels Concours d'Elegance in nearby Seabrook, but it was also an opportunity to take advantage of Dr. Mark Brinker's invitation to visit his car collection in Houston. Mark is one of The Alfatross' most ardent suitors, and although we have corresponded for several years, we had never met in person.

A small part of Mark Brinker's collection of limited production Italian exotics, one-off American exotica with interesting history, and special rare sports and racing cars produced for the Japanese Domestic Market. 

With what seemed like hundreds of cars of every conceivable type and age on exhibit, in addition to just about anything that would float, there was something for everyone at the Keels and Wheels Concours d'Elegance.

This Pegaso Z102 Spider was the kind of car I came to see.  Had we entered The Alfatross this would have been part of her competition.

And of course what kind of a concours would it be without
 sky-diving, flag waving daredevils landing with pinpoint
 precision on a floating dock? 

One of only 36 surviving B-17s, the "Thunder Bird" is 71
years old and still going strong! It's 4 radial engines make
 1,200 hp each.

It was only a weekend jaunt, but as long as we were there anyway, we decided to make a side trip to Galveston and see the Lone Star Flight Museum.  Much to our surprise and delight we got to get up close and personal with a vintage machine of a very different type.  Just as we drove up a WWII B-17 "Flying Fortress"--one of my all-time favorite flying machines--was coming in for a magnificent landing!   

We also hit the Johnson Space Center to see some of NASA's new exhibits, including the Space Shuttle replica Independence mounted atop the specially-modified Boeing 747 used to ferry the shuttles from the their manufacturing and landing sites to the launch pad at Cape Kennedy.   

OK, so I didn't get any work done on The Alfatross for a few days, but even car restorers deserve a break every now and then . . . .  
Thanks to Richard Coberly, Ronnie Veerkamp, and Dr. Mark Brinker for a most amazing and educational weekend!

We thought the Thunder Bird was big until we saw this combination: the shuttle Independence  riding piggyback on the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft N905NA !   231 ft. long, 195 ft wing span.  Fully fueled  take off weight 710,000 lbs!  HP?  . . . many gajillion.

Some Disassembly Required . . . (Post #127)

So The Alfatross has been in two concours, won two Third Place awards in major events against world-class competition, and was chosen as the first centerfold model for the US Alfa Romeo Owners' Club magazine Alfa Owner and I said I intended to sell it when it was finished.  So why is it still sitting in The Shed? Does no one want it? Not hardly! Am I so intimately involved with this car that I have owned for 48 years that I can't bear to part with it? Not that either!

The reason is as much a surprise to me as it probably is to you: After the Santa Fe Concorso The Alfatross was looking so good I just couldn't face taking it apart again to fix all the things that I knew were not right. 

So what does it take to make it right?  

Well, there are big things and there are small things. None so big that they would keep you off the Concours field, but none so small that they would go unnoticed by a close observer knowledgeable about Alfa 1900C SSZs.

Let's start with one of the big things: the car's stance, the height the body rides on its chassis.  

Period photo of a 1900C SSZ.  Note how narrow the space is between the tires and fenders.  Gonzalo Alvarez Garcia.

With the first set of reproduction springs The Alfatross' stance is much too high.

Measuring the ride height at the apex of
the wheel openings while weighing the car
at each wheel.

Ever since The Alfatross' debut at the Arizona Concours I have known that I had to change its ride height. The body rides too high on the suspension system in spite of all my efforts to reproduce precisely the original front and rear coil springs according to the Zagato specification sheets supplied by Peter Marshall.  As I mentioned in previous posts, one of the front springs was broken when I got the car, so I sent the specifications to Hypercoil (http://www.hypercoils.com/) to have a new pair reproduced. I thought the original rear springs would be fine, but they made the rear sit too high, so I had another pair made by Hypercoil. With the new springs installed, the ride height was still too high front and rear by at least two inches.  

Precise measurements are necessary!

The ride height is totally dependent on the coil springs, so they are what I have to change.  I didn't know why manufacturing new springs using the original specifications did not produce satisfactory results, but I knew I needed another approach. So back to Hypercoil and suspension engineer Mark Campbell. But first I had to weigh the car at all four corners and measure the ride height unloaded and with two people on board. Then I needed to fill out Hypercoil's calculator sheet to provide precise numbers for 8 different dimensions to come up with the "spring rate", "wheel rate",  and "motion ratio". In addition to obtaining these measurements I also took pains to measure the distance from the floor to the top of the wheel arches directly above the spinners to make sure I had baseline ride height numbers.  

I discovered that a lot of factors affect the readings for the distance from the floor to the top of each wheel arch.  First, you have to be sure the tires are inflated equally. Next, roll and jostle the car vigorously to settle the suspension. Be sure the measuring system you use is accurate--stretching a tape measure isn't going to do it!  I used a steel meter stick, a small T-square, a bubble level and a lab pedestal with rubber-tipped clamps to hold everything securely and took the readings in millimeters.

Even with passengers on board the rear stance is still too
high!

With the car unloaded and approximately half a tank of gas the stance on both sides in the rear was 73.6 cm while the stance in the front was 71.5 cm on the right and 71.1 on the left side (part of this difference could be due to the lack of symmetry in the hand-made body). So the body over the rear wheels was between 2.1 and 2.5 cm (about and inch) higher than it was over the front wheels. Adding a 90 kg driver and a 64 kg passenger made the body ride an average of 3.8 cm lower in the rear and 1.5 cm lower in front--still too high!

The bottom of the front spring rests on a spring plate
attached to the lower A-arm by 4 bolts passing through
spacer washers between the arm and the plate.  Replacing
the factory spacer washers with thicker ones effectively
shortens the spring and lowers the car!

The front ride height can easily be lowered by placing "spacer washers" between the bottom of the spring plate and the lower A-arm.  In fact, the cars came from the factory with 5 mm thick spacers in place.  

All that was needed to change the spacer 
washers: 3 short lengths of all-thread, 
8 longer 10 mm bolts with nuts and washers, 
and Harold's 8 25.4 mm thick spacer washers.

The ride height now after installing the spacer washers is
about 2 inches lower.

I reasoned that lowering the spring plate 1 inch would lower the ride height the same amount, so I cajoled local fabricator Harold Williams into making eight spacer washers for The Alfatross out of aluminum stock in exchange for me picking up his tab at the Car Table for a few weeks.  We're still on the barter system here in Santa Fe . . . . The spacer washer fix worked great. It lowered the front suspension by an average of 5 cm (2 in), even though the spring plate was lowered by only 1 inch. Hypercoil engineer Mark Campbell explained that this is a predictable result of a trigonometric function called the Motion Ratio. There is a lot more to spring and suspension engineering than you might think.  At the moment I'm just trying to get the ride height right.  We may still need to work out other aspects of proper suspension like spring and wheel rates . . . but we'll save that for another day!