12/9/04
Revisiting Tires and Horns

I ordered new tires for the Ferrari and they arrived at the tire shop, so I decided to take the tires off the car, and take them in my truck to have them mounted.

I ended up buying a set of Pirelli P4000s. I bought the VR rated 205-70-15s that should fit better than the 215-75-15 I originally bought. Trying to match the original aspect ratio of 80, I thought the larger size would work out, but I didn’t realize the 205 width was as wide as I could go with the GTE body size.

I took the wheels and tires down to a local tire shop to have them mounted, and I prayed there would be no problems. The only other choice was to take them back to tire shop in CT that mounted the first set, but that was a 90 minute drive away! I tried to watch the mechanic do the work on the car, but the service manager soon shooed me out of the shop for liability issues. Wanting to be respectful of his insurance policy, I looked on from inside the office, but I was as nervous as an expectant father. I didn’t feel that they needed to know that these wheels were worth more than $1000 bucks a piece, but I’m sure they could sense my concern.

Another complication was their tire balancing machine would not take the hub adapter I made for this purpose, so I had to finish the job at a second shop! The second shop I was sent to seemed to have more experience with wire wheels, and I wished I had gone to them first. They couldn’t do my job immediately, but asked me to leave the wheels. I was reluctant to do it because I would have to pick them up another day, but really didn’t have a choice. I called them the next day, and they said the work was done, and the wheels balanced up nicely, however, they noticed the wheels were not in true!? Had the previous shop bent my wheels? Had the simple task of removing the old tires and mounting new ones knocked these wheels out? I’ll have to put these wheels on my car to see how bad it is, but boy is this frustrating!

While I was up at my house, I decided to fix a small detail on the air horns. A few years ago, I painted the horns with paint the just wasn’t the right color red to look right on the car. The red is supposed to be a scarlet/red, and the color I ended up with was more orange than red.

Before painting, I stripped one of the horns of the old paint with lacquer thinner, and buffed the cast aluminum to a shine.

While I was at a Walmart, I saw this can of spray paint for model making. It was a commonly found paint made by Testors called Transparent Candy Apple Red #1605. This color sounded like what I was looking for, and was worth a try.

The first coat had promising results (the right one) with more of a red hue than orange. Although red is hard color to reproduce accurately with a consumer digital camera, you can see a slight color difference between the two horns. With subsequent coats, the horn should get richer in tone.

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