Tag: glas 1700 gt

Posted on

Glas 1700 GT: BMW 1600GT rebuild rabbit hole

Whenever I need a little reminder that it can be done I go to this site and look for a little inspiration.  A BMW 1600GT rebuild in .be with little to no narration, but very eloquent pictures and elegant solutions.  Especially helpful is the fact that I have a very similar car that I will be going through some of this stuff with in the near future.  Don’t follow the link unless you have some time to spend looking over some good work.

Update on my Glas 1700 GT?  It’s headed to a shop for some body work next week, the engine is nearly together and about 30 pieces of the car have been powder coated, so it is moving forward…

The Sprint Speciale of BMW’s?  Well, Franco wasn’t involved and realistically it’s a badge engineered Glas GT making it a Frua, and therefore magically Italian, and numbers are low -but low enough to be serious money one day I can’t say.

Posted on

Glas 1700 GT: What color?

I got these color charts in an email from Sascha in Germany who has a 1700 GT. Now that I have the original palette to choose from, I am rethinking the color I should paint the car. It needs a lot of body work so a light color would be best. It looks to have originally been white and later repainted to red. I’m not interested in red, having had a number of red cars over the years. I like the idea of white, but my cousins GT is white. I go on about light blue and gray Alfa’s, maybe this is my chance to paint something one of those. I have alternately decided on light gold, metallic dark dray and metallic light blue, so maybe I should settle on one of those. Tough decision. What do you think?  Post a comment with the color from the charts below you would paint a Glas GT if you were about to paint one.

Perlgrau and Aquamarin are pretty sweet.

Continue reading “Glas 1700 GT: What color?”

Posted on

Glas 1700 GT: bringing it home

It’s really funny to think that I had plans to have this car run before Rufus was born, and here he is 6 weeks old already!  Well, today I made a big step in the direction of it running -I went and fetched it from Sacramento!  As soon as I saw it again the fire was stoked, and I’m hot to get it put together.  The bottom end of the engine, rebuilt head and all the other little parts I’ve cleaned up have been waiting for this.  Time to get cracking!

Freshly powder coated wheels look great.  Tires are 175/70/14’s.  Two of the rims had some scale rust around the valve stem hole that prevents the stem from sealing so I will be using inner tubes in those two wheels.  Almost looks like a car from this side -being mostly red and all.

Continue reading “Glas 1700 GT: bringing it home”

Posted on

Glas GT Market 1: 1700GT project or parts car

Update 3/27/12: This car sold for $1442 after 22 bids.  A decent result for a rough looking example.  Interest in these cars increases?

3/15/12: Glas 1700GT.  First -pardon the non-Giulietta market post, but as I mentioned when I got my Glas GT, I plan on there being an occasional aside to the headlining act, and someone has to try and figure out what the market for these cars is.  This car is on eBay out of Illinois.  Looks to be too rusty to be a viable restoration candidate, but the sheet metal is ALL available and very inexpensive -too bad it’s as much work to weld up one of these as a Giulietta Sprint.  There are no pictures of the engine -maybe they couldn’t get the hood open!

Pretty straight and complete looking.  Shame about the door rust and, well, all the other rust too.  Headlight rings are aluminum.  Front bumper really makes the front end look a lot more complete than it looks without it.

Continue reading “Glas GT Market 1: 1700GT project or parts car”

Posted on

Glas 1700 GT: making headway

Today was an exciting day, the head I dropped off at my local machine shop for a skim and valve job a few weeks ago turned up and progress on the build could begin again.  I asked for the budget build -basically the minimum required to get me on the road, which turned out to be new stem seals, a quick pass with a fly cutter to skim the head and a nice valve seat cut.

There’s corrosion around the water passageways and deposits on the exhaust valves, but the head is flat and the valves hold pressure, so it should work -would in Calcutta.  Check out the angle the spark plug comes in at.

Continue reading “Glas 1700 GT: making headway”

Posted on

Glas 1700 GT: One part at a time

A car restoration can be looked at from a lot of perspectives -some with blind trust through a pen writing checks, some like a soccer coach all passionate on the sidelines cajoling the players, but for me it’s all a hands on, do it yourself deal involving my time, hands and some percentage of my processing power at any given time with the intended consequence of improving things and learning. That and the occasional trip to the powder-coaters.

Some days I am enthusiastic because I genuinely enjoy the challenge of taking a neglected mechanism, unable to fulfill it’s intended function and cosmetically challenged, and making it work and look good.  Other days I keep my enthusiasm up by imagining driving the finished product and saying without much conviction ‘it just a bunch of nuts and bolts holding a few special brackets in between together’.  I wrote a post about this ‘nuts and bolts’ approach when I was working on the Sprint Speciale, early in the life of this blog.  That post was concerned with process and finish, this one is more a study of psychology psychosis or whatever -from a pscientific perspective

Intake parts here, the duplex fuel pump again, a good portion of the remote float bowl, one of the chokes, booth accelerator pump covers and a hose clamp.  In this orientation and state, they are little more than intricately beautiful mechanical objects sitting near each other on a tray.  Put them together with the rest of their coterie in a particular way and they precisely pump and meter fuel.

Continue reading “Glas 1700 GT: One part at a time”

Posted on

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?

Continue reading “Glas 1700 GT: planning ahead”

Posted on

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.

Continue reading “Glas 1700 GT: The engine”

Posted on

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.

Continue reading “Glas 1700 GT: One is the loneliest number…”

Posted on

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.

Continue reading “Glas 1700 GT: Tour de Glas”