The Day of Reckoning (Post # 18)

Last night we skewered the Alfatross. 

Much to my surprise, it took only a couple of hours and nothing went wrong.  Was it good preparation and planning, or just dumb luck?  Probably a mix of both, but we're going with the prep and planning explanation. If you've been following the posts up to this point you were probably wondering why it was taking so long.  Well, "measure twice, cut once." 

Dave and I knew we would need some more hands so we asked around and got three enthusiastic volunteers without even twisting any arms.  Brian Williams, collision repair estimation specialist at Auto Right and Jeff Kramer, retired Alfa enthusiast, have been following this blog so they were up to speed on what we needed to do.  Dr. Toni Carrell (Dave's Mom) volunteered to shoot the photos.   

The Alfatross resting on its trolley, prepared for skewering and mounting
on the rotisserie.

  

The gun sight.  Looking past the wooden grill opening protector bolted
to the 2 X 4 front "bumper" to line up the front and rear brackets.
Clearances are minimal.

The first thing we did was  to change the plan.  Jeff observed that it might be easier to feed the axle pipe through the car starting at the trunk opening rather than at the grill opening.  It was a better idea, even though it meant that we would have to raise the 200 lb axle pipe to head height to accommodate the angle.  An engine hoist volunteered to do that part for us. 

The axle is 17 ft. long and weighs at least 200 lbs.  We're going to use the engine hoist in the background to help us thread it
through the body, firewall,  and brackets.

Feeding the axle though the body, firewall and support brackets turned out to be a piece of cake, but clearances were very tight, particularly at the lower end of the grill opening.



Here you can see how close the axle comes to the bottom of the grill opening. There is less than half an inch of clearance on either side.

Pinch bolts on the brackets lock the axle to the chassis.  The axle turns in the rotisserie sockets at either end

The step that took the longest was mating one end of the axle to the rotisserie frame.  Some drilling,
hammering, reaming and cursing encouraged it to fit.

The Alfatross breathes a sigh of relief as Brian and Jeff unbolt and remove the trolley it sat on for the last 10 years.

The last step was to attach the alignment bar to the rotisserie supports at either end. 

My accomplices.   Left to right: Brian Williams, Dave Carrell, me, and Jeff Kramer. 

The next major task is going to be soda blasting the body and chassis.  I'm going to try renting a trailer-mounted diesel-powered compressor and start that job later this week.  But first I have to round up some fittings to make the blaster and compressor compatible.  I have about 200 lb of soda on hand, but it might not last very long once I get started.  I want to experiment with different grades for different purposes (rust removal vs. paint removal, for example) so I just placed an order with Eastwood.  Anyone contemplating a major soda blasting job shoul be aware that the shipping charge effectively doubles the cost of the soda!

Rotisserie Brackets and Zagato's Zagato (Post # 17)

In the Shop

Dave and I had to get back to our "day jobs" for a while, but we're back at it again now and it looks like there will be a lot of time during the  next several weeks to get things done on the Alfa. Last night Dave tack welded the front and rear brackets for the rotisserie shaft after making sure the alignment was good.  Then we unbolted them and he took them to his shop for final gas welding of the heavy steel joints.



Tack welding the transverse beam for the rear bracket to the plates that
bolt to the tops of the rear shock towers.



Long stretch to tack weld the feet of the front bracket to the engine mounts. 
The PVC pipe is for alignment of the steel rotisserie shaft.

We hope to bolt in the finished brackets this weekend.  Then all we have to do is round up about 4 more strong backs to help us carefully thread the heavy rotisserie shaft through the grill opening, then through the front and rear brackets and out the trunk opening, level it so the ends can be mounted on the rotisserie frames, remove the trolley, insert the lower rotisserie horizontal member, align everything, and see if it works. 

What could possibly go wrong?

Networking

This blog isn't attracting much in the way of  public comments, but every now and then I get feedback through e-mail.  Sr. Matteo Bosisio of  Route Borrani sent me an e-mail last week about a very special 1900C SSZ he saw in a show in Milan recently: an "original and unrestored" car owned by the Zagato family and Sr. Rivolta, a brother-in-law.  Evidently, it is for sale, but Mr. Bosisio says it is going for "crazy money."  One of those "If you have to ask . . . ." items, I guess. 

Anyway, this is an important member of the Alfatross's small family.  I suspect that it is one of the last cars build because it has characteristics that I have never seen on other family members.  Many thanks to Sr. Bosisio for these photos!

I call this car "Zagato's Zagato" for obvious reasons.  Not the double bubble roof line and the sharp, forward-leaning nose.  Image by Matteo Bosisio.

Note the "A. Zagato" and "M. Rivolta" driver and co-driver names on the fender.  Also note the somewhat unusual single "Z" just below the names.  Zagato used a variety of logos over the years.  Sometimes it was just the Z and sometimes the whole name was spelled out.  Image by Matteo Bosisio

View from the rear quarter.  Note the rectangular taillights and bulge above the license plate light housing on the trunk.  I have never seen these on any other member of the family.  Image by Matteo Bosisio.

Research 

I have an old Auto Capital Italian car magazine from May/June 1981 that has an article about the history of the Zagato carrozzeria.  It features a couple of photos of a 1900C SSZ and a caption that says, "un'Alfa 1900 SS speciale costruita da Zagato in un solo esemplare, ora completamente restaurata dal carrozzeriere milanese: di tutta la sua produzione, la Zagato ha conservato questo modello e una Lancia Flaminia Sport."

I think it says that the featured car (a member of the 1900 Zagato family)--now completely restored--is one of only two cars produced by Zagato that the Zagato family retained.  But I can't tell from the photos if it is the same car as the one Matteo photographed.  Point is, even after about 90 years of producing some of the most beautiful cars ever made, the Zagatos are particularly fond of their Alfa 1900s.

The Curse of the Alfatross (Post # 16)

At some point I want to elaborate on my experiences with sub-contractors as a way of illustrating why you need to be very careful about letting bits and pieces of your car out of sight.  But this post is just for fun.  I don't believe in curses in the paranormal sense.  But I do believe in coincidences--that  might look like a curse--if you were inclined to believe in them.  They are seared in my memory because they always slowed down progress.  It was only after the "coincidences" began to accumulate that I started to wonder about the curse thing. 

• Ten years ago I paid $175 to have a specialty spring made.  Not a big, impressive suspension spring but a tiny, intricate one that opens the louvers in front of the radiator.  When I went to pick it up, the company was out of business. 
• When I contacted the guy who was restoring the wheels to find out what was taking so long he said he had to go in for a hernia operation and would be out of action for a few months. 
• A pattern maker who was supposed to cast a part for me sent it back because his foundry-man retired suddenly. 
• The guy I sent the engine to for a rebuild was injured when his shop caught fire.  Then he had the Alfatross engine for 8 years, always just about to start on it again.  I was lucky to get it back at all. 
• The mechanic who was inspecting the differential didn't come back to work one day and was never seen again. 

After moving to Santa Fe, things seemed to be going much better, until . . . .

The Sky Is Falling!

As I mentioned in the very first post, the Alfatross's "final resting place" is a brand new, purpose-built, well-insluated, high-ceilinged, heated workshop in the mountains of New Mexico.  It must have been quite a relief for the Alfatross, after spending years in the rain, snow, heat and humidity of South Texas, North Carolina, Michigan, the hold of a ship, and northern Italy to have at long last an appropriately safe and stable place to live.  An so it was for about 18 months until . . . the Curse of the Alfatross returned!



The Alfatross during a period of outdoor storage in central Texas.

Part of the workshop is a cozy office where my wife, Toni, works.  One cold, dark, snowy February day in 2011 she noticed a dusting of sheet rock fragments on the floor.  I was out of town and no one had been in the shop for a few days.  She looked up and to her horror realized that the ceiling had split open in a long, ragged crack.  Toni didn't need a crystal ball to know that an indoor avalanche was on its way.  I would like to have heard what she said to the builder over the phone.  Whatever it was the response was immediate and dramatic.  A framing crew was there the next morning, shoring up the ceiling and trying to determine what happened.  The verdict was that the roof joists were 50% undersized.  Collapse was imminent. 

It could have been a lot worse.  The builder stepped up.  He said yes, mistakes were made.  Now we're going to fix them.  There will be no charge for the work.  We will figure out how to move and store your cars.  We will move everything out of the shop and into a container that we will deliver to your property.  We will clean up afterward.  We will make it right.

The solution was to install full-size joists next to the half-size ones.  All we had to do was move the cars and everything somewhere else while they tore out the lights, wiring, sheet rock, and insulation to get to the joists.  But what about the Alfatross?  The builder came up with the perfect solution: with the 12 ft ceilings in the shop we could build a bomb-shelter, roll the Alfatross inside,and let the work go on around it!


Only Toni's quick action averted Death From Above when the roof began to
collapse under the weight of snow and ice in the winter of 2011.  Everything
had to be removed from the shop in order to replace the roof joists, insulation,
wiring, sheet rock, and lighting.

Everything except the Alfatross, that is.  We built a strong house around it for
protection and sealed it up inside the shop.

. . . for a long winter's nap.

It took quite a few weeks to do all this in the dead of winter, but in the end the shop came back together, the Alfatross emerged unscathed, and now our roof is 50% stonger than the engineering calls for. 

Maybe I'll put a deck up there one day . . . .

1969: Disillusionment; 2013: Soda blaster (Post # 15)

This is another post split between 1969 and 2013:

Rewind to 1969

The Alfatross needed work.  "All it takes is time and money," two things every university student has in abundance, right?  A drive in the country on a chilly, but glorious, November morning ended abruptly with smoke wafting up from under the dash when I switched on the heater fan.  Later, on another ride the brakes gave out when the left front line rusted through and burst. 

I made a feeble effort to locate a source for parts for the Alfatross, but quickly learned that no one in central North Carolina had ever heard of an Alfa Romeo 1900 (they always pronounced it “Romeo,” as in “and Juliet”), and there was no factory or aftermarket support.  This was before foreign cars began to take over the market in the US, so even metric fasteners were hard to find. And of course the Internet, the go-to place for all information and shopping opportunities these days, was not even on the horizon. So I parked the Alfatross in front of my apartment intending to fix it later, but never drove it again under its own power.  I doubled up on classes to keep my student deferment, but was drafted anyway.  The fate of the Alfatross hung in the balance.

Fast Forward to 2013

The rotisserie is still "work in progress."  Both Dave and I had to get back to our "day jobs" for a while.  But that doesn't mean we're not still making progress.  As soon as the Alfatross is up on the rotisserie we want to start cleaning it with Dave's soda blaster. 

Gear Heads will know what this is, but if there is anyone reading this that doesn't, permit me to explain:  Whether it's pots and pans ancient artifacts, or an old car, there are only two ways to clean it: chemically or mechanically.  With cars chemical strippers are often used to dissolve paint and other coatings.  Scraping and sanding are typical ways to clean car bodies mechanically.  Each method has its uses--and missuses!  We once spent weeks trying to figure out how to chemically clean pewter plates from a shipwreck .  The solution was to clean them in a blast cabinet using off-the-shelf bread flour!  The soda used in blasting consists of fine crystals similar to bicarbonate of soda.  You can regulate the pressure depending on what is being cleaned.  It removes paint effortlessly without damaging metal or surrounding glass, chrome trim, rubber seals, etc.  Small jobs can be done in a blast cabinet, but big jobs, like cleaning an entire car, require more of everything.  Make that a lot more.



Soda blasting the Alfatross's aluminum  brake drum inside a cabinet.

Dave's soda blaster is a hungry beast.  It devours soda and compressed air like you wouldn't believe!  I estimate we will need a dozen 40 lb bags to start with and a 7.5-10 hp compressor with a big reservoir that can put out at least 28 cfm at 90 psi.  and guess what . . .they don't give those things away! 

The soda blaster.  Rotisserie in background.

So soda and the compressor are on order along with an upgrade to 240 V electrical service for the shop and a request to the weather gods for warm, calm days ahead because this is one job that has to be done outside! 

Anybody out there got a gently used 10 hp 28 cfm compressor with a big tank and maybe some decent filtration?

1969: Enthusiasm; 2013 Still rotisserating (Post # 14)

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:

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

Crude tracing of emblem painted on trunk

Fast Forward to 2013

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.

Assembled rotisserie in foreground is just under 20 ft long!

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?

  

Down to Brass Tacks (Post #13)

Bo offered to sell me the car.  I was tempted, but there were a few other things on my mind at the same time, like getting drafted!  This was 1969, the war in Viet Nam was in full swing and Uncle Sam needed more cannon fodder.  All males born between 1944 and 1950 were given a lottery number, and when your number was drawn, you were drafted--unless you had some kind of deferment.  Being enrolled in an institution of higher learning could keep you out of the draft, but only if you completed a certain number of credit hours per semester.  And I was a little behind . . . . 

Then there was the money.  I didn't have any.  For some reason it didn't occur to me that a penniless university student who is about to be drafted needs a 14 year-old clapped out exotic Italian sports car like he needs an all expense paid trip to Southeast Asia. 

So I bought it. 

Numbers are important for cars, too.  Every car has a lot of them: part numbers, registration numbers, license numbers, body numbers, chassis numbers, engine numbers, etc.  To register a car you have to know the chassis number and it's good to know the engine number, too.  At the time it was a nuisance looking for them but eventually I realized they are of critical importance.

Chassis number AR 1900C *02016*

Engine number 1308*01541*

Being in law school, Bo drew up a contract enabling me to pay in installments.  The first installment in October, 1969, was my old Honda 305 Scrambler, already an antique itself, but freshly painted with a rebuilt transmission . . . and even more freshly wrecked!  Days before consummating the deal on the Alfatross I flew over the handlebars at about 40 mph on a bridge right in front of a Greyhound bus.  I came out of it largely intact, but the bike was a mess.  Later I determined that the odometer cable had wrapped itself around the front drum brake after a strut worked loose, instantly locking up the front wheel. 

Unfazed, Bo delivered the bike anyway to a customer he had already lined up.  In order to save the deal I had to throw in what passed for a stereo set in those days: a record player with two speakers.  The other payments were in cash totalling $770. 

A year later, for better or for worse, the Alfatross was mine!

Wheels and Spinners (Post # 12)

While the work is progressing on the rotisserie other important aspects of the restoration are moving along in parallel. The rotisserie is one of the items on my list of individual tasks that can be done in-house.  But there are a lot of tasks that it is wiser to farm out.  It isn't always easy to decide which is which.  A good example is the Wire Wheel Saga. 

The Alfatross triple-laced 72-spoke "Record"
wire wheels before restoration.

My wheels were in pretty bad shape from the beginning.  They were one task I knew I would have to send out to a sub-contractor.  Why? you might ask.  They look like nothing more than beefy bicycle wheels.  How hard can it be?  The correct answer is VERY!  The somewhat delicate light-weight alloy rims have to be separated from the spokes and hubs, which are steel.  Everything has to be cleaned, re-chromed, and re-assembled.  Special jigs and equipment are necessary.  I asked around for advice on who could be trusted to do the job and was directed to Mr. Cork Adams of Precision Wire Wheels in Quincy Illinois.  Two years and $2,763.65 later they came back.  It was worth the wait.  I almost hate to put tires on them and put them back in service!

In addition to cleaning, re-chroming, and re-lacing, Cork also re-stamped the rims with the original manufacturing data and applied the "Carlo Borrani SPA" decals to the hub interiors.


 

An original spinner after the vacation in California 

As the wheels were nearing completion I turned my attention to the knock-off "spinners," which seem to have seen a lot of neglect and curb-surfing over the decades, not to mention the fact that you are supposed to hit them with a hammer to tighten or loosen them!  They were rusty and in need of re-chroming, but the biggest concern was how to restore the embossed Alfa logo and "dismount" instruction engraving. I considered trying to do this myself as well as trying to buy NOS replacements, but I really wanted to restore the originals that came with the car.  Both options dead-ended.  Cork said he knew a guy in California who might be able to restore them, so I sent all four spinners to Cork to forward to his engraver.  At this point things started to go sideways: an object lesson in what can happen to your stuff when you send it out to a sub-contractor.  The guy in California was going through a divorce, or his dog died, or his pencil was dull or whatever.  At one point he said he lost my parts!  Finally, months later, I got the spinners back in much worse condition than they were sent out in--and a bill for $50!  Restoration was no longer an option!

Restoration is no longer an option

Then a miracle occurred.  Leafing through a car magazine one day I saw an article about the revival of the Borrani company, long out of business.  The article said someone had breathed new life into the firm and they would soon be up and running again and able to manufacture new wheels and spinners using the original dies and equipment!  I saved the article but didn't follow up until I decided that 2013 would be Resurrection Year for the Alfatross.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote to Matteo Bosisio, Head of the Classic Wheels section for Ruote Borrani.  He wrote back immediately with the order information for exact replacements for the Alfatross, and referred me to Borrani's supplier in the US: A&M Garage in Austin, Texas.  To make a short story even shorter, the order process was as seamless as it was painless and the new spinners arrived THIS AFTERNOON! 

A new spinner from Borrani

The new spinners are perfect replacements.  I will keep the old ones because they are original, but they are now just paperweights.  There are a couple of things worth pointing out in the Wheel Saga: First, the cost of sub-contracted wheel restoration is not out-of-sight, as I had feared.  The wheels and spinners together cost $3,965. The real drag was the time it took!  Point Two: Modern interest in old cars like the Alfatross enabled the revival of Borrani and the availability of authentic replacement parts.  And the Internet made it possible to find Borrani and parts I needed in a matter of minutes.  FedEx got the parts to me almost instantaneously.  Somehow, at least in this case, things that used to hold up progress for months--like exact part identificaion, customs, currency exchange, check clearing, translations and the like--just weren't there anymore.

And get this--Sr. Bosisio had a look at this blog, liked what he saw, and wrote back: "If you happen to be around Milan, please call me I will be more than happy to guide you thru the Alfa Museum and take you for a visit over to the Zagato facility."

How's THAT for service!