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1972 Fiat 124 Sedan Special Suspension Squeeks

The other day I drove the Fiat to work so Steph could drive the ‘luxury liner’ as she calls the BMW 325 wagon on some errands after work.  Every bump I hit caused a horrible knock/bump sound from the front suspension.  I crawled under the car and discovered that one of the sway bar mounting bolts had sheared and the silent bloc had made it’s way out of the mount so the bar was banging on the lower control arm.

Fiat 124 Sedan Special sway bar mount is not nearly as complicated as the drop link arrangement found on the Giuliettas I’m used to.  Here the silent block IS the mount.

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Berlina recommission becomes Sprint originalization plan

I’ve been thinking about what I want out of the Berlina and how best to achieve it. I want a daily commuter that gets as close to 30mpg as possible with plenty of torque and top end. I have been pondering the quickest, cheapest and easiest approach to getting this out of the Berlina and I think I figured it out yesterday after an hour long session going back and forth between a catalog and an Excel spreadsheet followed by a call to my local used Alfa parts supplier. I’m going to pull the carburetted 1750 that is in my 1959 Sprint out and put it in the Berlina then put the original 1300 back in the Sprint.

What a mess! You can see from this picture why I was keen to freshen up the engine bay on the Sprint. An hour of work and I’m ready to crawl under the car to disconnect the transmission.

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Market #34: Barn find Giulia Spider Normale

Sold!  33 bids and an ending price of $8700.  Almost exactly what I sold mine for a few years back.  If it can be brought to life and put on the road without much fuss then a very good buy.

Giulia Spider AR10123*373944, Engine 00112*04458.  Available now on eBay is this 1962 Spider.  Seller says it doesn’t run but rolls and steers fine.  Rust is reported to be limited to the shelf behind the seats and the hood edges.  From the pictures it appears this car has the 3 shoe drum brake set-up and a later split case 5-speed.  No mileage is stated but these cars seem to accrue about 80 – 100,000 before they are taken off the road for lack of some small repair only to turn up as barn finds 20 years later.

I owned a 1962 Spider very similar to this car.  It was a single carb 1600 with a split case 5 speed and 3 shoe drum brakes (you can read about it here).  It had similar patina but no rust.  The engine looked about the same and with a little coaxing came to life easily enough.

Originally white, now red, with over-spray all over the place.  Looks like a straight forward honest car, not quite a wax and go, but almost.  All the trim is in place and there are no obvious problems.

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Giulia Super chases BMW Neu klasse video

If you ever wondered what it would have been like if ‘Streets of San Francisco’ had a sister show in Italy then wonder no more. This Maurizio Merli clip from the early 70’s is pretty tough, with all the obligatory car chase moves including avoiding baby-stroller pushing pedestrians, crashing through a flower stand and kicking out a broken windshield. Awesome! Maybe the Berlina needs to be Italian Police spec.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYcbgBpMYXE&feature=related]

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1959 Sprint gets new (old) seats

When I bought the 1959 Giulietta Sprint a few years back the PO had installed Duetto round tail Spider seats in it.  I never really learned to like them so when a pair of unknown Italian, probably Alfa Romeo or Fiat seats in good shape for $300 came up for sale on Craigslist I decided to go for it and bought them. 

There were no seat tracks included and one seat had a rusted bolt broken off in the base but other than that they were in original and very nice condition.  I pulled the Duetto seats out and sold them to a friend which turned out to be a mistake because it didn’t occur to me that the track widths of the seats could be different than the car.  Last weekend, a year after removing the Spider seats, I finally got both seats neatly and permanently mounted. 

“Fabricato Dalla Suardi Francesco & Figlio, VIA BINDA N 20, TEL. 470-412, MILANO.”  Anyone know anything about these people?

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New member of the family: 1972 Berlina

I did a quick calculation and found that at my current usage, I would reach the end of the warranty on my daily driver at 100,000 miles 13 months before the term of the warranty is up in March or 2010.  Time to get a cheap commuter!

My commute is 30 miles each way and I travel both ways at the early edge of the 880 traffic, so unless there is an accident I get to do 35 – 60 mph the whole way. A beater pre-smog sedan with a 5 speed and an economical engine would be a perfect commuter for me.  I didn’t have much to spend initially so I had low expectations about what I would find, but I figured I could drive the 1959 Sprint until something turned up.

Last Saturday I went by a friends Alfa repair shop to buy some Sprint interior trim I needed for the Sprint Veloce and this car was parked on the street out front.  I asked what was going on with it and I was told the engine was coming out then it was going to the local Alfa pick-n-pull, unless of course I wanted it.  I asked how much and for the same price as the hand full of Sprint interior trim I bought it.

1972 Berlina 11500*3000189, California Blue plate 564 GQB.  Originally Silver with black interior.  Doesn’t look too bad.

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Pixar’s 2008 Motorama

Every Summer Pixar’s in-house car show Motorama takes place on the magnificent Pixar grounds.  Designed as an opportunity for Pixar employees to show off their rides and hang out, the show presents an interesting cross section, as is evidenced in the event photos. 

I really like the free-for-all, run-what-you-brung nature of this show.  Too often I find myself bored at a car show, wondering how many more Corvettes or new Ferrari’s I can look at before I am completely desensitized.  Highlights for me included a Pixar employee owned perfect VW split window camper bus, a Peugeot 402 articulated hard-top cabriolet on loan from Fantasy Junction, a Norton Manx engined Cooper and a gorgeous red and silver Lotus Elite.  Here are a few of my favorite pictures, the rest can be seen here.

BMW /2 in the Pixar atrium.

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Identification numbers part 3: Bertone body number

Manufacturing automobiles by hand is not a simple task. A large number of individual car specific parts have to find their way from sub-contractors and various corners of the shop to the car they were made to fit. To help make this happen Bertone assigned each car a number independent of the autotelaio number Alfa had earlier, or would later assign and all the parts requiring fettling to fit the individual car were marked with this number either by stamping or with grease pencil. It makes sense that this number would also be used for billing Alfa for bodies built so it’s likely that all the Bertone built Sprint prototypes had a Bertone body number.

Here it is, the first Bertone number I ever encountered *6510072* corresponding to Autotealio 20379. The font of the punches used to stamp the body numbers never changed. This car also has 072 written in grease pencil on the underside of the hood.

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Italian motorcycle police display

Once again I’m straying form the topic of Giuliettas here but I couldn’t resist this video. Only the Italians would decide this was a good idea. Perhaps someone knows what kind of bikes they would have been riding? I can’t think of an Italian big bike manufacturer from this period so I’m tempted to say they are BMW’s.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jC9qgH14N_0]

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Giulietta Sprint Accessories part 2

Right after the last installment on Giulietta accessories these two black and white pictures were discovered. I have read that a Bertone technical booklet exists detailing all of the possible accessories but I don’t suppose I’ll ever see it.

The first picture is of a 750 series Sprint and shows several accessories and an anomaly I’ve never seen elsewhere. The most obvious accessory in this picture is the fog lamp kit. It differs from the 101 kit in that the grill opening surrounds are unmodified, just the grill bars were modified to mount the fog lights. The lights really look a lot like Hella 128 items in this picture. I wonder what sort of switch they used and where it was mounted.

This 750 Sprint wears a lot of the available accessories. I wonder if it is one of the early prototypes?

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