Category: Working on my Cars

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Glas 1700 GT: planning ahead

How do you plan for a classic car restoration project?  Do you do research, make lists -parts to buy, tasks to accomplish, money to spend, craftsmen to talk to?  Or do you dive in and start taking things apart because your money supply and knowledge are vast?  When I was working on the Giulietta SS I sold last winter, I had short term lists, but no long term list.  I didn’t have a budget to meter out money, and I didn’t have a clear path to success.  With my Glas GT project I am trying to do as much up front planning as possible.

Can’t have a post without an image right?  This is the pilot bearing assembly in the end of the crank shaft.  It is indeed a little needle bearing.  Anyone have one of these special tools I can borrow?

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Glas 1700 GT: The engine

The parts car came with two engines, the one that was mounted in it, that I showed a picture of last post -all crappy on the outside, clean on the inside, and a parts engine that doesn’t look like it’s good for much.  I have decided to build the dirty on the outside/clean on the inside engine after pulling it apart and checking out the important stuff like bearings and bores.

It takes a while to get an engine apart if you are trying to document where everything goes and then it takes extra especially long if every bolt and nut has rusty threads.  Here it is after about 2 hour.  Block has lots of surface rust -nothing serious.  This trolly is really helpful.

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Glas 1700 GT: One is the loneliest number…

What does every shitty Glas GT project need?  That’s right.  A parts car.  I placed notices around here and there on forums for a parts car and sure enough, one turned up.  This car is a very very late in the production run car, and very very rusty.  Money was slight -almost trivial really, and it has that ‘ran when parked’ look to it, though it’s been a while.  I spent most of my day taking it apart.  Viva la full set of rims!

Yea -or is that yikes?  The good?  It’s all there.  The bad, it’s 200 pounds lighter than a stock Glas GT due to metal loss on the underside.  The ugly?  It was a low miles nice original car before it fell into the wrong hands.

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Glas 1700 GT: Tour de Glas

You’re reading this with a bit of interest and a bit of eye-rolling, after all this is giuliettas.com, not glasgt.com, but hey, it’s really mattsvehicularinterest.com, so humor me. I’ll inevitably talk about Sprint’s since they tend to be my frame of reference.

I was cruising the bits and bytes and found FCB Free Car Brochures.  The have a lot of good brochures scanned at VERY high resolution, including some Giulietta’s and Glas’s (awkward plural -anyone?).  I was thinking that most of you are probably like me, and have only ever seen a Glas GT at the point in the story where mine is -at the end of act one, just before act two begins or might begin, in other words, as a derelict disassembled depressing heap.  Well, this post is meant to take you back, to the beginning of act one, where the virgin is still a virgin, the dog hasn’t run away, and the crops are still growing.  From the top: Welcome to the all-new 1963 Glas 1300 GT!

This is the first picture in the 1963 brochure and represents what would have been many peoples first glimpse of the new GT based on the 1300 sedan.  Sexy car, sexy color, sexy girl not included.  Note the 1300GT doesn’t have a hood scoop.  Alfa wasn’t the only one to add a ‘decorative’ hood scoop to give their slightly larger engine a little head-room.  Like the Alfa 1600, the Glas 1700 was given a longer stroke.

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Glas 1700 GT: Ate clutch slave

The hardest part of fixing up a car with very little support is the odd model-specific OEM part.   The Glas GT has just such a part in its clutch slave cylinder, an Ate item.  My car came with one -a bit of good luck if you will, but it was VERY frozen and just generally not an encouraging prospect for clutching.  Jaan was confident it would come apart and sure enough, it did.

The thing about hydraulic pressure is, it doesn’t really take no for an answer, so long as the question has enough pressure to force the recalcitrant part to answer.  In this case I cleaned it, we applied serious cutting-torch type heat, and then we hooked it up to a 2 ton bottle jack.  We let it sit at about 100 PSI over night and the next morning, a little pump on the jack saw the cylinder pop out.

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Glas 1700 GT: rebuilding the fuel pump

Update: I made a little Glas GT dedicated page above -check it out!

The Glas GT has a Weir type fuel system similar to the Porsche 911’s.  Two single throttle-body Solex carbs are fed from a remote float chamber.  Fuel pressure is maintained by a pair of mechanical fuel pumps operating off the same shaft.  I haven’t worked out the fuel path yet but it looks like one pump keeps the float bowl fed from the gas tank, and the other pumps fuel to the carbs.

The finished product -well, almost, I still need to make some paper gaskets and get some little copper crush washers.  Filter chamber covers have been plated and polished, screws just plated.  Very nice!

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Glas GT project: Cleaning parts and Making plans

I mentioned that I brought home a few parts last week when I did the deal.  The last few days at the shop after closing time I’ve been cleaning them up.  It’s frustrating to not have the whole car to mess with, but it’s also liberating since I can focus on the handful of parts I do have to mess with.  Cars are assembled from a finite number of parts and every part that gets cleaned, prepped and packaged for later assembly to the car is a step closer to the car being on the road.

The first round of cleaning included what you see here: the fuel pump, a wheel cylinder, the starter spacer and the combination oil pressure send unit/cam locating plate (maybe?).  I’m going to plate the screws and reassemble the pump tomorrow.
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Nature abhors a vacuum they say… I bought a Glas 1700 GT!

Preamble:  I, Matt, in order to keep hands from idle pursuits, to keep wallet light, to keep the wife up on her eye rolling exercises and to stay basically entertained, bought one cheap and rough looking (and truly rough in fact) Glas 1700GT.  All you really need take away is:  cheap, rough, crazy.
Okay, so I spent my day in Sacramento buying, paying for, inventorying and pulling the brake parts off of a 1966? Glas GT.  Norm bought it sight unseen off Craigslist a few years ago and it’s languished in the corner of his garage out of sight -mainly due to being more unsightly than he expected.
Proof that Alfa’s aren’t the only cars to literally suffer from the good intentions of their owners.  Yellowy-green is a primer of sorts circa 1990, brownish rough looking stuff is iron oxide, red is paint applied prior to 1979 and the stray glimmer of white on the nose is the original color.  All-in-all, sad looking but solid and straight.
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Project: Dads 1947 Chevy 3100 part 5

Sometimes taking it apart actually isn’t easy.  Last winter, when my dad called me to tell me the rear end was so locked up that the truck had to be dragged onto the flatbed, I got off the phone and looked up what the assembly looked like.  Torque tube rear ends have a bunch of extra bearings, some complicated assemblies, and lots of tapered splines etc.  I wasn’t looking forward to the day when I got to work on it, but today the day came and it really wasn’t that bad.

I showed up at my dads place about 11 and found him with a 6 foot pipe on the end of my 2 foot breaker bar trying to get the bolts that clamp the pre-load section of axles to the housing.  The four bolts pointing out at the camera.

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Project: Dads 1947 Chevy 3100 part 4

Despite having a full plate I managed to get up to my dads place a few weeks ago and got most of the engine back together for the Chevy truck.  In the last installment we cleaned up the pistons, inspected the rod bearings and got everything ready for reassembly.  My dad thought we would be lucky to get the pistons back in the bores -he was pleasantly surprised by how much got done.  I think I will fall back on working on old vehicles for a living if my business endeavors don’t pan out.
I was working along and realized I wasn’t taking any pictures so I got my iPhone out and took a few.  We used the same ring compressor I use on Alfa engines to install the pistons, the same Redline assembly lube on the bearings and the same can of WD40 to wet the rings.  Connecting rod caps and bolts are as expected.  The main worry here is that the little ‘scoops’ in the sheetmetal parts that go over the connecting rod caps are oriented correctly so the turning of the crank forces oil into the scoop.
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