12/15/02
Must Carry On

I’ve been pretty distraught over the recent events with my domain. As of tonight, I still don’t have a home for my web site, but I’m working on it. If you’re reading this close to the date of this journal entry, then you are truly the dedicated, because you found me from some other Ferrari channel. I commend your dedication, and appreciate your support!

With this limited viewership, I decided that you still deserve to see a weekly update, so I’m going to try and carry on!

I installed the cover plate I made last week on the gas tank access hole. This is a picture of it through the rear glass of the car. All this will eventually be covered up when the back panel is upholstered and installed.

The snow we got in the Northeast last week was almost melted away from a good rain, but there were still patches of melting snow, salt and mud up in Connecticut, so driving the car in the muck was not really an option, so I looked for more winter projects to keep myself busy.

One of the projects was to strip and refurbish the front nose pan to the car. It’s an aluminum splash shield that fits right below the nose of the car and covers the area below the radiator. The hole in the pan is for the radiator drain petcock.

After scraping the loose oil and dirt off the panel, I covered it with paint stripper. Forget using those environmentally safe water soluble strippers, nothing beats the really toxic stuff! You know the kind. It burns any uncovered part of skin, makes you choke when you don’t have good ventilation, and let’s not talk about what happens when it gets in your eyes! It’s pretty dangerous stuff, but as the old paint starts to look like a wrinkle finish, the paint scrapes off like a latex skin.

Within 30 minutes, I had all the paint off both sides of the panel. The parts with the original green Ferrari primer took two applications to get it completely off.

With all the paint off I took a moment to closely inspect the nose pan. I’m pretty sure it is original from the evidence of the green primer that Ferrari (Pininfarina) often used to prime aluminum parts, but I didn’t see any marks of the Pinifarina build numbers stamped on the panel. Perhaps it was one of those panels where grease pencil was enough to mark this piece for the assembly line.

Another neat thing was you could see each hammer mark made by the person who made this piece. I always think that these panels were probably made by the apprentices at the Pininfarina shop. If they learned how to make these pieces well enough, they would graduate to make actual body parts on the car.

By the end of the day, I hammered out some of the dents and major deformations on the panel. It’s one of the first things to hit, when driving over a parking barrier, so it looks like it had it’s share of encounters. Eventually, I get it on the car to make sure it fits well before I put any paint on it, but that will have to wait until next time.

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