I took the hood off the 330 to re-glue the hood pad and install the hood stays. It’s a lot easier to work on the hood with it on a workbench!

Fitting the freshly chromed bumpers always need a little work on the details before mounting them on the car like chasing all the threads on the mounting studs.

The same goes for the grille. Making sure the pieces all fit together, installing a new rubber gasket, and mounting the horse in the grille all need to be done before fitting it to the car.

I was waiting for some yellow fuel lines to arrive in the mail for this 275GTS I have at my shop, when I saw a small drip of coolant on the floor under the car.

When I inspected this car a several weeks ago, I marveled at how dry it was under the car, and I think I jinxed myself! I followed a trail of coolant on the front of the engine back to the weep hole at the bottom of the water pump!

Sometimes if you ignore this little drip, the water pump could go for years without having to replace the seal, but it depends. I have found these issues rarely go away, and now was the time to fix it.

The water pump on a Colombo V-12 takes some work to access, and requires removing the hood, then the radiator, then the associated hoses. It sounds like a lot of work, but it’s a lot easier to start the job knowing these parts come out, than to figure it out along with way!

I started to remove the water pump body to check how hard it would be to slide out before unbolting the main crank pulley. Once the water pump started to release, I went ahead and pulled he lower pulley so the water pump housing could be removed.

When I first took the impeller off the water pump, the carbon seal fell to the floor. Normally, this carbon ring that presses against the back of the impeller is securely sealed against the rubber water pump seal assembly.

I found this fit was loose, and probably leaking water from this area. There’s an internal spring that presses this assembly against the back of the impeller to create a seal, but this was no longer working.

We have found sometimes the spring pressure is not sufficient to make a good seal, and have had to shim the back side of this seal to push the water pump seal a little harder against the impeller. I will have to take a look at the replacement seal when it arrives in the mail to see how well attached the carbon ring is secured to the rubber seal as well!

With the radiator out of the car, decided to remove the cavallino mounted to the grille and send it out for replating. The rest of the car had fresh paint and good chrome, but the horse could use a little freshening up. Access the nuts that secured the cavallino to the grille was much easier from behind without having to remove the whole grille!

Thanks everyone for contributing to the Annual Fund Drive. I can’t tell you how much it means to me to have your support and appreciation for the time and energy it takes to collect, edit, and present all the Ferrari Content I interact with through the year to share on the Internet. I love what I do with Vintage Ferraris, and get excited to share them with you here and on all the other platforms and am happy you all like it too! Here’s to a good 2024 and an even better 2025!

I got a SI 330GT back at the shop after a couple years of body work and paint.

The car was purchased a few years ago by the owner who wanted a 300GT painted to match his modern GTC/4 Lusso.

After purchasing the car, he sent it to me for disassembly and paint.

Unfortunately, after the paint and layers of filler was removed, we found a common problem of bad and cheap body work. Previous accident damage was covered up with body filler instead of being properly repaired.

Even the places where the previous shop welded in metal, the repairs were horrible. The decision was made to fix this car right before we sent the car in for a color change, but that took some time. It’s now done, and I’m now on the final push to get the car assembled and onto the interior!

Initially, I had the paint shop agree to reassemble the car, but I soon realized they were in over their heads. They had originally disassembled the car for paint, but reassembling it takes a lot more attention to details. I had the paint shop do the easy work like reinstall the headlights, tail lights, and windshields, but had them return the car to me for the more complicated stuff. These areas needed special attention like replacing the window felts, installing stainless trim pieces, and getting the side windows installed.

Unlike the 330GTC that I recently did, the side window frames on a 330 2+2 stay in the door, so the felts and trim have to attached differently.

I also had to make sure the window motors were working properly. Whenever a car gets painted and parts get left in the car, everything gets covered in a layer of sanding dust. Fine particles of metal, primer, and paint fills the air of a paint shop and collects on everything, so the window motors inside the doors got their fair share of dust.

I removed the motor and cable mechanism for a cleaning and bench testing.

Some motors have three wires to them, and some of them have two, so hot wiring them to work can be sometimes be tricky to get both directions, especially when the spool of cable is trying to bind or unravel. I stretched the drive cable across my work bench around a bolt acting like a pulley and clamped the motor to my table to tension the drive cable for testing.

Once I carefully wrapped the drive cable properly on the spool and made sure it’s working smoothly, I held the cable taught to the spool with a small zip-tie. This little trick helps me keep the cable in place as I transferred this Rube Goldberg set up into the car’s door.

I tried my best to keep the kinks and twists out of the cable as I restrung it on the internal pulleys of the door, following the diagram I drew before taking it all apart, making sure the cable crossed the same way as they came out. When the cable was almost completely installed, the zip-tie was keeping the last bit of length needed to loop around the last pulley. I reached inside and cut the zip-tie which hopefully allowed it all to be installed correctly. If not, I would have the pleasure of starting all over again back at the workbench. I only had to start over once for each of the doors!

Thank you to everyone who contributed to my fund drive. It means a lot to me to have your support!

If you’d like to send money via USPS, you can send checks here:

Tomyang.net LLC

P.O. Box 36

Hollowville, NY 12530

I’ve been working on prepping a green 330GTC for months to bring for Concours Judging at Cavallino in January of 2025, and have been trying to correct every last detail. One item caught my eye and it was the tag on the top plate of the air filter assembly. These tags were originally installed with solid rivets and someone reinstalled it with pop rivets. I also think the tag was installed in the wrong orientation. Unfortunately, when pop rivets were used, the holes may have been widened, and installing the correct solid rivets might not work anymore, but I really wanted to make this look right.

Normally, I would break out my drill and take these pop rivets out, but that could risk enlarging the holes even more, so I carefully ground the head off the rivet with a Dremel tool until it was paper thin, and peeled it back off the delicate tag so I could preserve it undamaged.

Since I was working on the top lid, I decided to repaint the front lip of the lid to fix some paint chips. I could have stripped the whole lid, but at some point we have to fix only what’s necessary!

Luckily, the holes in the air cleaner lid were just small enough to accommodate the solid rivets where I could still peen them in place.

I know it’s a small detail, but it’s these small details that make show cars stand out next to being near perfect!

I can’t thank you all enough to contributing during my annual fundraiser. I know it comes at a hard time of the year with the Holidays and other obligations, but that’s where it means some much more to me that you still contributed to this website and all the media I create for the rest of the year. It not only benefits me, but everyone else who uses this website to fix, restore, and maintain their cars.

If you’d like to send money via USPS, you can send checks here:

Tomyang.net LLC

P.O. Box 36

Hollowville, NY 12530

With the distributors out for service and rebuilding, I could turn my attention to the carburetors. The 400GTs have 38 DCOE side draft carbs and after I took the air boxes off, and the associated velocity stacks, I was finally able to get to removing each carburetor.

One sign I did not like to see was the squeeze out of red RTV on the intakes. RTV is not compatible with fuel, so anything inside the intake runner exposed to fuel would eventually be sucked into the combustion chambers. It’s not catastrophic, but using the proper o-rings would have been a better method of sealing the intake runners.

Taking the first intake runner out proved exactly what I suspected. Any RTV inside the intake runner, was missing, showing that it had eroded and was sucked into the engine.

I started the arduous process of disassembling each carburetor, inspecting the parts, and making sure things were working properly.

Some of the bores were showing some kind of concretion. It was probably from cold starting the car, and never letting the engine warm up. The cold fuel from the accelerator pumps would collect in the lower half of the side draft carburetor bore and when the fuel eventually evaporated, it left this residue behind. After doing several of these cold starts and shut downs, the residue can really collect.

Something strange happened in one of the float chambers to leave this residue, but it’s anyone’s guess. I know when I’m done there won’t be any trace of this anomaly!

The DCOE carburetor just fits in my gallon sized ultra sonic cleaner. I only have to do one carburetor at a time, as by the time I strip the next one, the first one is ready to come out of the tank, so it becomes an all day disassembly and reassembly affair!

I needed to replace the old dry rotted o-rings on the accelerator pump plugs, so I ordered a set of 7mm x 2mm viton o-rings. They came in a set of 25, and since I only needed 12, I figured I would have enough to do the next set of 6 DCOE carbs. The 0-rings cost about 7 bucks, but the shipping was $10!

What mess it was to pick out all the RTV!

I put the distributors back in the car along with the carburetors, timed in the engine to the ignition, balanced the carbs, and got the engine running fairly well so I could take the 400GT out for a test drive. The car still needs a clutch, but I wanted to get drive the car for the first time to identify any other issues before taking the car apart. Here’s the video of first round of work with a test drive.

Thanks again to everyone who contributed to my fund drive. Your contribution allows me to make more content for everyone to enjoy. If you haven’t contributed, please consider joining this community of like minded individuals that value the information shared on this website, and all the other media platforms I upload to. It brings us all together to celebrate old Ferraris and keeping them alive!

If you’d like to send money via USPS, you can send checks here:

Tomyang.net LLC

P.O. Box 36

Hollowville, NY 12530

A Ferrari 275 GTS arrived at my shop this week and it was newly purchased from Gullwing Motorcars in Astoria, NY. A long time customer of mine asked me to go down to NYC to take a look at this car being offered for sale, and I shot a video of the process of inspecting a car for sale.

I found a couple of issues on this car during my inspection and test drive, but generally liked the car. There was a discrepancy on the stamping on the engine number matching the chassis, but I confirmed it was the correct Ferrari engine, only swapped for its original engine many years ago. Decades ago, when someone had an engine problem needing a rebuild or repair, Ferrari shops would often swap out a similar engine for the original one to expedite the repair for the customer. Sometimes, they would even re-stamp the engine to match the chassis as courtesy, but you can imagine the confusion and problems we’re facing years later when these numbers don’t match the original factory documents and internal build sheets. Gullwing was well aware of the discrepancy on this particular car, and discounted the price accordingly. I confirmed the engine was healthy, and felt the mismatched engine was not going to detract from the enjoyment of this convertible V-12 Ferrari, at perhaps a 30% discount! My advice was to buy.

One of the things I found on the car that needed to addressed was the broken window crank on the driver’s side of the car. On closer inspection, I found the window crank shaft had stripped after the internal cable mechanism jammed. Someone forcibly tired to crank down the jammed window, only to strip the internal gears of the crank mechanism.

Luckily, I had a spare window crank mechanism in my spare parts stash that was identical to the one I needed to replace. I just needed to un-string the old cable and transfer it to the replacement spool. I felt there was enough of the old cable that I could successfully re-use it still having enough length to operate the window. I could have replaced the cable, but this one was in good shape and not kinked so I gave it a shot.

I carefully took notes on how the cable was wound on the old spool and how many wraps around the spool it took before exiting the crank frame. I secured the cable on the spool with a zip tie so I could put the crank assembly in the door and install the cable onto the rollers. Anyone who has done this knows how troublesome this can be, but I managed to get it all working the first time! That was a lucky day!

Here’s a video of some of the work I did on that window crank in the 275GTS.

The rest of the car and engine compartment looked pretty good, and didn’t look like it needed much work.

One thing I did want to replace on this car was the degrading yellow fuel hose. There was a batch of yellow fuel hose that was sold in the 80s and 90s that over time has shown to weep past the sheathing. This faulty hose is easy to spot by the goo oozing out along the sheathing of the hose. This defective hose also has a dull almost matte finish compared to the newer hose that has a shiny yellow jacket.

Something in modern fuel seems to dissolve the rubber inside this old hose and causes it to ooze out. I figure if it’s coming out from inside the hose, then this same ooze is going through the fuel and into the carburetors, so replacing this hose is probably a good thing. What’s interesting is the older hose that I’ve seen on unrestored Ferraris seem not to degrade like this faulty hose, not does the new hose currently being sold by all the usual suppliers. Whatever the case, it you see yellow fuel hose doing this weeping, it’s time to change it out!

Thanks again to everyone who contributed to my fund drive for this website and all the other media I’m posting these days. It really means a lot to me to have your support. I love sharing all the things I do and learn around cars, Vintage Ferraris, and all things mechanical, but it’s also nice to know you all appreciate the same things I do and recognize the work it takes to bring it all to you.

If you’d like to send money via USPS, you can send checks here:

Tomyang.net LLC

P.O. Box 36

Hollowville, NY 12530

I received a new car at the shop a week ago, and it’s a 5-speed 400GT. The owner recently bought this car, made some cosmetic upgrades, worked on the A/C system, but couldn’t get the car to run right despite my consultation over the past few months. He decided it was best to just send the car to me and have me do the work beyond his abilities and get the car sorted.

When I first got the car off the transporter, I confirmed the car ran like crap! It was a cold day when the Passport truck arrived, but the driver said the car didn’t run any better when he picked it up in the warm south!

The car wouldn’t stay idling, had no power, and felt it was running on 6 cylinders. The clutch take up was very high and a new clutch was on my list of “to-dos,” however the lack of power made me slip the worn clutch even more just to get the car to move.

Once I got the car inside, I checked the accelerator pumps on the carbs and found a couple of clogged jets. It looked like there was some residue on the internal parts, so this was not going to help with its tune!

I knew the carbs would have to come off for a cleaning, but I also wanted to take a peek at the distributors. They are stuffed way back under the cowling in a 400GT, but with a combination of ratchet extensions, u-joint couplers, and calisthenics, I got them out of the engine compartment.

This car had only one set of points in each distributor, compared to later and earlier cars that have two. The second set worked differently for different cars, but this one made it simpler to tune the distributor without a second set to sync. No matter the case, the points in these distributors were pretty crusty. The contact points were pretty dirty and rusty.

I checked the first set of distributors on my Sun Distributor machine, and found the advance mechanism was sticking. The grease on the internal pivots of the advance weights were probably hard and dirty. I decided to pull them out and send them to Dave North for a full service. I can do this service myself, but Dave, provides this service to many of us in the Vintage Ferrari Business. It took me a while to come around to using Dave, not because of his quality, but because of the convenience. If I put a distributor on my machine, and it advances smoothly, is relatively clean, and simply needs a set of points, phasing, and adjustment, I can have that done in a hour or so and installed back in the car by the afternoon. If the distributor needs more work, I can certainly do it, but Dave has all the springs, shims, and parts to rebuild the distributor, with probably more patience than me! I learned it was easier to send the distributors that need more attention to Dave while I spend my time working on other things. Besides Dave enthusiastically enjoys working on these distributors!

Sending out distributors for Dave to fix them gives me more time to work on blog posts and videos, but that doesn’t pay me for the time it takes to keep all this media going! I do benefit in many more ways than money from all this I do. I’ve made some lifelong friends that started from this website. I’ve also traveled and seen some great cars through invitations because people found me through a blog post or video. Having done this for over 25 years it has become a regular routine to share my Ferrari Journey with you out there. All of you benefit from all this content because of the passion and excitement I get sharing this adventure with you. As in most passion projects, like minded people benefit from them, but the monetary support often comes from just a few. I know several hundreds of people read this website, but only a few dozen contribute during each pledge drive. I appreciate each and every one of you for donating, and being a patron to what I do for Vintage Ferrari Content, and I hope others consider joining this special group. Thanks!

If you’d like to send money via USPS, you can send checks here:

Tomyang.net LLC

P.O. Box 36

Hollowville, NY 12530

I’m down to the little details to prep a green 330GTC for Cavallino in January. These Pirelli heater hose stickers are not required for the shows, or add any points, but it’s a little detail that’s nice to have on a car.

There were different labels on these cars, and they were either paper stickers, or rubber stickers that were vulcanized to the hose like this one I found on an original unrestored GTE.

The stickers you can buy are made of a rubber material, they don’t really have a sticky backing, so I glue mine in place with a combination of silicone and cyanoacrylate glue, securing it with string until the glue sets.

SInce I had an order in at Kilimanjaro Designs for my sticker, I ordered a ZF steering box tag. This is a potential deduction as it goes on a hole at the bottom of one of the bolts securing the steering box together. It’s a tamper tag to let people know the steering box was sealed at the factory.

I noticed the windshield gasket was not sitting flat against the fame of the car, and although it was installed properly, there was a slight gap between the gasket and the window frame on the driver’s side windshield. Putting pressure down to let glue dry overnight was a challenge, but I manged to install these c-clamps and flexible steel ruler to do the job overnight. Another little detail fixed!

We’re almost half way through the December fund drive and I want to thank everyone who has contributed so far. I can’t tell you how much it means to me to have your support through the years. I look back at all the things I’ve done in the world of Vintage Ferraris, and was able to share all of it with you on this website and now on all the social media platforms. I don’t know how my predecessors did it with phone calls, telex, and fax machines! Sharing all this media has become so much easier. These days, I’m able to snap pictures or shoot short films on my i-phone, text them to my fellow mechanics, and discuss repairs in real time. This makes my job easier to share information to anyone who asks, and if you benefited from this information, this is the one time of the year I ask for a contribution. It helps cover some of the time and money it takes to create all this content, and pay to have it exist for free on the internet, but more importantly, it tells me you appreciate and enjoy the stuff I post. It inspires me to keep doing it for years to come! Thank you!

If you’d like to send money via USPS, you can send checks here:

Tomyang.net LLC

P.O. Box 36

Hollowville, NY 12530

I picked up all the parts from my machine shop so I could start reassembling the engine to the 330GT 2+2 I’m restoring. I decided to assemble this engine back at Francois’s shop in CT about a 90 minute drive from my shop in NY. It might seem like a long commute, but I plan to make this trip about once a week for the next several weeks until the engine is completed. Francois and I have still been working together on small projects, but I have not spent a lot of time at his shop since COVID, and I miss it. Although I have plenty of work at my own shop, I wanted to spend some time with my Mentor and build this engine together. It’s also nice to have a second set of hands and his years of experience double checking my work. I look forward to this build and the time I spend with the Frenchman!

Charlie Olsen sized all the bearings in the block and rods, along with fitting the new pistons to the rods, so I’m starting well ahead.

I pulled the main caps off and laid in the crankshaft in its saddle. Charlie had this original Ferrari billet steel crankshaft polished and it looks beautiful. It’s almost a shame to have to bury this deep in the bowels of this engine and not get to see this pretty piece of machinery!

I installed each main cap and torqued them to spec making sure there was no binding or excessive drag. The “feel” of drag was taught to me by Francois and I’ve committed it to my soul of Ferrari Engine rebuilding. The same goes for setting the end play of crankshaft thrust washers. We had a problem with the new thrust washers and spent time disassembling, checking, modifying, refitting, and reinstalling until we got it just right. There’s a spec for the end play, 0.076-0.180 mm, but Francois taught me how to feel that clearance by moving the crank back and forth. I’ve pulled out feeler gauges in the past to check, but have learned to trust our “feel!”

I installed the piston rings on the new pistons and stock rods. These rods may look small in comparison to modern high performance engines, but remember, this was what was high performance in the 50s and 60s, powering an engine that produced 250-300 horsepower. The pistons have some new technology with changes to the ring lands and coatings on the skirts, but the general shape is similar to the originals. We’re building a stock engine with marginal gains in horsepower, but we’re not building a race motor with high compression and the ability to spin faster than stock RPMs. I feel increases in this department is a waste of money for a street engine. Most dyno specs come at peak RPMs, where normal driving rarely sees. Spending that kind of money for more power is more for the benefit of bench racing for the owner, and the shop charging for the extra work!

Thank you everyone for contributing to tomyang.net the first week of my December find drive. It’s good to know you’re all still out there following along on this blog! I worry that this blog has become invalid because of all the other outlets for people to consume media. I love posting new videos on YouTube and even the occasional post on Instagram and Facebook, but those outlets seem so impermanent. Searching for information about Vintage Ferraris on those sites is so much harder and unpredictable, taking you to places that drives more traffic to their sites, than giving you the information you need. This blog and website is still searchable, and I use it all the time myself! I hope you appreciate the access, and support its future. Thanks again to my long time followers, and contributors, and I welcome the new viewers to this website to support this little corner of the web!

If you’d like to send money via USPS, you can send checks here:

Tomyang.net LLC

P.O. Box 36

Hollowville, NY 12530