tom@tomyang.net

I had to rebuild a water pump to a 250GTE engine this week, but I first had to get the impeller off!

When I first tried the 12mm acorn nut that held the impeller on the shaft, I could feel it wasn’t going to move that easily. If the nut was seized onto the water pump shaft, and I continued to force it, the shaft could shear and it would be a lot more trouble and expense to find a replacement water pump shaft. The best way to loosen this nut was to use the “heat wrench” to break the bonds holding the nut in place. A carefully placing an oxy-aceletene torch flame on the nut to reach a dull red color quickly can usually create different contraction rates of the parts so the nut will loosen. Since the impeller is bronze, care had to be taken not to melt it in the process!

The heat worked like a charm, and I soon had the water pump disassembled.

The face of the impeller was pretty well worn, but that is why this part is replaceable. Vintage Ferrari water pumps have a design that leaves a lot to be desired. They often fail and leak and are not very reliable. Look for a solution in an upcoming post!

Before I attempt to get this water pumps rebuilt, I had to address the corrosion on the pump. After removing the crud, we can see a lot of the aluminum was eaten away by electrolytic corrosion. Although the efficiency of this water pump will be compromised, we’ll have to weigh this against the cost of a replacement. Time to get on the phone!

TomYang.net Monterey Cocktail Party

This year’s party has moved away from Quail Lodge to a house in Carmel-by-the-Sea generously co-hosted with the Coady Family. It will held on Thursday the 23rd of August starting at 6pm. If you’re in Monterey for the car weekend, I would love to have you come. Please contact me privately for details: tom@tomyang.net

My plans this year is to attend the Quail show on Friday, Concorso on Saturday, Pebble Beach on Sunday. Somewhere in that time, I’ll head to the track, preview the cars at the auctions, and squeeze in a few meals. Reach out if you want to meet up!

A very nice Ferrari 330GTS was dropped off at my shop for my inspection. The owner has been trying to win a Platinum award with this car and has missed by a hair. I did not restore this car, and don’t even know who did, but the work on this car is very nice, and it’s a shame the owner hasn’t been recognized with this top award.

Ferraris are judged in America on a 100 point scale created for the Ferrari Club of America where 97 points or better is a Platinum award. Depending on which show you attend, there are gold and silver awards to cars scoring below this mark, but I’ll explain that another time!

Several weeks after the show, the owners can request the score sheet that the three judges used tabulate the results to see what the deductions were, and generally why.

You can imagine how upsetting it is to see this car lost the Platinum mark by just 1/2 a point, but it was my job to help gain back these few points.

The good news is I agreed with the deductions, so at least we weren’t chasing points that were mistakenly deducted! The horn cover was a reproduction piece, but not painted black. The original ones were made from a white plastic, and painted black. I’ve seen some in white, but for those who work on these cars generally feel it’s a safe bet to paint these black. Since this one is grey underneath, it’s getting painted black.

Below the trunk area, there is a trim strip held down by a clip. For some reason, the previous shop installed this trim strip short of covering the whole length of the pinch weld, and as noted in the score sheet, there was a question if this material was correct. Since I know who makes the correct reproduction piece, and needed to replace the shorter piece that was installed, I could correct two issues.

I know it’s subtle, but the material on the right is the correct piece.

I removed the pitman arm cover to strip the paint and return it to its natural finish.

It’s a common mistake, so I don’t fault the restorer, but this could have been the 1/2 point that lost the award!!

There were a couple of other details I found that needed correcting even though they weren’t on the score sheet, one of them being the spring hose clamps on the some of the hoses in the engine compartment. Although the correct type, the hose clamps originally came in a black oxide finish. Most clamps purchased new today come in a clear zinc finish, but not back when these cars were built. I had a batch finished in black oxide and will be swapping these out.

Another oversight by the judges was the rubber o-rings that neaten up the spark plug wires.

To install the wires, I had to partially disassemble the wires and slide the o-rings into place. It’s a small detail, but can be a 1/2 point deduction to another judge.

I found another small detail missing on this car that I will try to correct. The door rubber on a Vintage Ferrari convertible has a cover to finish off the end of the weather stripping. I can see why they missed this little detail because the top was up when they judged this car, but my goal is to make this car perfect, and if a smart judge knows where to look, he can find the missing pieces!

I’ve heard of stories where people study the score sheet from a failed attempt at Platinum, correct every note in the past score sheet, only to have a set of judges at the next show find other things wrong! Judging from show to show may be fluid, but a win is based on incremental gains. If I can gain back points on this car that were missed, next time it can make the difference of the 1/2 point I’ll need to win!

I can hear the eye rolling from some of the readers out there about the pedantic process of Concours Judging, but try not to judge. Achieving this level of perfection allows owners to feel they have the best of the best compared to other cars. Ferrari owners are used to being the best at what they do in their regular lives, so carrying it on to their hobbies is very logical. When I help get these cars to this level, I approach it from a slightly different perspective. Whenever I work on a car, I try my best to assemble, paint, and finish these cars the same way they did at the Factory. The regular Ferrari Factory worker in Modena in 60s created Platinum level cars every day because that’s how they assembled them. I’m just doing the same thing!

TomYang.net Monterey Cocktail Party

This year’s party has moved away from Quail Lodge to a house in Carmel-by-the-Sea generously co-hosted with the Coady Family. It will held on Thursday the 23rd of August starting at 6pm. If you’re in Monterey for the car weekend, I would love to have you come. Please contact me privately for details: tom@tomyang.net

My plans this year is to attend the Quail show on Friday, Concorso on Saturday, Pebble Beach on Sunday. Somewhere in that time, I’ll head to the track, preview the cars at the auctions, and squeeze in a few meals. Reach out if you want to meet up!

There is a mysterious hole found on 250s and some 330 Ferraris that is a jack receiver hole. Although I don’t ever recommend using these holes to insert your jack to support the car up by the rocker panel, they are often missing the chrome cover.

The jack support is basically a tube welded to the rocker, but if you’ve ever seen the inner support for this tube, you wouldn’t use them either! The little jack hole plugs are available, but the clips that hold them in place never seem to work. The clips on the original ones seemed to fail with the same regularity as the reproductions, and I was lucky enough to find one of mine sitting on the floor with a broken clip next to my car instead of lost by the side of the road! I decided it was time to find a better solution!

The other problem is when the jack hole plug is inserted, the plug doesn’t sit flush with the rocker because of the angle of the bodywork. Most of the cars I’ve seen have hollow tubes all the way through the rocker, which gave me an idea for a solution.

I cut a thin piece of sheet metal long enough to reach just past the end of the tube, and wide enough to fit snugly in the jack hole. I drilled a hole in the end, bent the side holding the plug at an angle and used loctite to secure the nut to the chrome jack plug. I slid the assembly into the hole and bent over the extra end of steel to secure the plug in place. Now the plug sat flush with the rocker panel, and hopefully won’t fall out. If it rattles, I’ll put a daub of silicone on the steel strip. I’ll let you know how they work out.

TomYang.net Monterey Cocktail Party

This year’s party has moved away from Quail Lodge to a house in Carmel-by-the-Sea generously co-hosted with the Coady Family. It will held on Thursday the 23rd of August starting at 6pm. If you’re in Monterey for the car weekend, I would love to have you come. Please contact me privately for details: tom@tomyang.net

My plans this year is to attend the Quail show on Friday, Concorso on Saturday, Pebble Beach on Sunday. Somewhere in that time, I’ll head to the track, preview the cars at the auctions, and squeeze in a few meals. Reach out if you want to meet up!

Several months ago, I posted the news that Quail Lodge quintupled the price of the venue for me to host the Tomyang.net cocktail party. I could not, and would not, justify their greed in raising their prices like that, so I’ve been scrambling to find an alternative location. I received several e-mails assuring me it wasn’t the location of the gathering, but the people who attended, but it still was not so easy to find a place to have my party in Monterey! My overpriced motel didn’t even have a breakfast room to use like the one we used to have our gathering on Munras years ago.

I saw Todd Coady a few weeks ago at the  Greenwich Concours and we talked about our Monterey plans. The Coady’s host a party every couple of years in Illinois, and it’s always a good time. When I commiserated with Todd about the loss of my party location, he said, “well, maybe we can use my rental house in Carmel!”

I was appreciative of his generosity, but wanted to make sure he knew what he was getting himself into! Todd reached out to me this week confirming his offer still stands, so I guess my party is back on!

We’ve decided to invite all my usual attendees, but will have RSVPs through me. E-mail me, call me, or speak to someone who knows me for the location. The house is in Carmel, just a few blocks off the main drag.  The party will start the usual time, Thursday August 23rd at about 6pm. See you there and Thanks Todd!

Having been away from the shop for two weeks on vacation, I found Francois was pretty busy! The Daytona transmission in for a rebuild has been completed, and Francois is threatening this is his last transaxle rebuild! He had a lot of problems with the reproduction parts fitting correctly, and often times fitment issues only show up when the gearbox assembly was nearly completed. The only solution was to disassemble the gear box, find the offending part, find a solution, and reassemble. Francois explained this was never how it was with gear box rebuilds. All the replacement parts went together nicely, and everything worked when assembled. Not anymore. The amount of hours it took to rebuild this transmission has not only increased, but seemed like a waste of time when the parts didn’t work. All it takes is a few thousandths of interference between parts and the transmission won’t work right.

Our next concern was how would the transmission feel when it was shifted with the reproduction parts. This test won’t be realized until the transaxle gets installed in the car and the engine is fired up. If there is a problem, we’ll have even more work to do getting everything apart again.

My bigger concern if we can’t find reproduction parts that work, then owners will have a harder time enjoying their cars, and owning a Vintage Ferrari becomes that much harder. If old Ferraris can’t be driven anymore, less people will want them, and  prices may even begin to fall if the desire diminishes. There are plenty of other cars people can own, drive, and enjoy, so we need to work as a community to find solutions. If I knew where I could get consistent parts that fit and work together every time, I would get them for Francois, but where?!

I received a box full of parts and hardware for a 250 engine we’re rebuilding, so I started sorting through the hardware to send the various pieces out for plating.

The owner bought a lot of new replacement hardware, but the original plating was different than what the new hardware comes in, but we’ll send it all out for the right period plating so everything will be as it was.

Speaking of making things right, I started the process of rebuilding the distributors on this 250 engine. The correct lug that connects the distributors to the coil looks like the one pictured above.

The insulator on the distributor I’m rebuilding looks like this. It looks like it was fabricated from scratch, and although they did a good job making a piece that would do the job, it wasn’t exactly right.

We have a box of old distributor parts that we cannibalize when we need to find hard to find parts. The common parts have already been taken, and I may have to find new source!

Each one of these insulator assemblies consists of 8 parts but three of them are specific to this assembly. I found one complete set up,  and will have to search for the rest. Does anyone know if someone is reproducing these pieces? If not, they sound like a job for my rapid prototyping guy!

I started an engine installation a couple of weeks ago which we thought would go pretty quickly, but has been fighting us all the way.

Our latest struggle was getting an oil temperature fitting on the oil pan.

As I tightened the fitting, I got that sinking feeling when aluminum threads began to pull out. Removing the fitting, I saw the evidence of what I felt when the threads pulled out.

We could retap the threads and install a thread insert, but clearance was tight considering the engine was already in the car!

On closer inspection, I could see there was plenty of thread left in the oil pan, and when you look at the Ferrari threaded adapter, it only inserted 1/3 of the way into the pan. The solution was to have our machinist make a new fitting with a deeper thread to catch more “meat” of the thread. Until this fitting is made, we wait…

I’ve been away on vacation with my family for almost 2 weeks in Ireland. I saw only two Vintage cars; a Ford Anglia and an Austin Healey 3000. The only  Ferrari I saw was a 430 in Dublin, and although I didn’t do any Ferrari related activities with my family during my holiday, I had plenty of things waiting for me on my return.

The shifter lever came back from my chrome plater ready to go back together, but I also got a nice e-mail from my friend Larry who read about the post about the welded shifter mechanism to the shifter I was currently working on.

If you recall, a previous shop took the easy way out and permanently welded the finger to shifter selector to the shifter rod. I was going to try and cut away the welding, and try to repair this bit of hackery, but the internet came to the rescue!

Larry had a spare shifter assembly with a good shifter assembly he was willing to sell my client and we immediately agreed to buy it. It’s nice to have the parts we need come to me, instead of taking the time and energy to search the world for these parts myself! This website sure comes in handy. Thanks Larry!