5/1/05
Spring Update

As Spring is upon us, I’m finding myself closer to finishing the car, but I’m also finding a huge list of things yet to be done. Here’s where I’m at so far:

Grille:
Mark and Steve are very close to finishing my grille at the Panel Shop, and may even be done by the time you read this entry. Ill need to find time to drive the hour it takes to get to their shop to pick it up.

Once I get it back, Ill need to spend several hours sanding and polishing the pieces before I put it all back together. The chrome horse I have will have to be mounted, and the rubber weather-stripping attached. To get the grille installed on the car, the front bumper will have to be removed, but all the new fasteners will be easy to remove.

Battery: I picked up my reproduction battery and need to get it into my car. Its a AGM battery which means it’s totally sealed and should not leak at all inside the Ferrari. It’s also made to look like a tar top battery from the 60s, so I can’t wait to show you how it looks installed in the car!

Fuel Leak:
I’m vacillating between giving once more try in solving my fuel leak by using another sealant on the yellow hose. Two Ferrari mechanics have suggested using this stuff, but I’m pretty fed up with screwing around with this fuel leak. I bought some regular fuel line and hose clamps as the quick and sure way to stop the fuel line from leaking, but I haven’t made up my mind which way I should go.

Overdrive:
With the installation of the new battery, I’m hoping it will help give me the voltage I need to kick the overdrive into gear.

Windshield Wiper Motor:
I picked up my newly refurbished windshield wiper motor up from Joe Curto’s shop. The motor looks great, but Joe doesn’t like the idea of me hooking it up to my old switch because he’s concerned about it burning out the motor. I’m a little more confident than that!

We bench tested the motor with a switch he had from a Jaguar XK-150, and everything worked fine. We concluded that if I needed to find another switch for my car, we could always look for the same switch for a Jaguar.

Scarsdale Concours:
I registered and am slated to attend, but there is one major issue. It has nothing to do with the car being ready because the organizers of the event have invited my car with or without the grille! What has happened is I may have to work on the day of the event! Although it seems sometimes I don’t have a day job from how much time I spend on this website and Ferrari, but occasionally I can be found working at the Ed Sullivan Theater for CBS Inc. Most of the time, I work on a show for David Letterman, but on Sunday May 15th, we have to convert the theater to host the Season Finale of CBS’s “Survivor!” The amount of work to put on this show, and return the theater back to normal, is going to take many hours of work. The logistics of me leaving in the middle of all this work to go to the Concours is almost impossible. There is still hope, but as we get closer to the date, the prospects look pretty grim! The forces against me finishing this car and presenting it to the world seem to be conspiring against me!

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