Giuliettas

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.

Continue reading “Glas 1700 GT: Tour de Glas”

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.

Continue reading “Glas 1700 GT: Ate clutch slave”