6/5/07
Cleaning Wheels and Picking up Parts

I’ve been spending all my spare time cleaning my wheels. It’s pretty boring stuff, so I have not been writing about it. Here’s the before and after of three hours of work per wheel. I hope I manage to keep them looking like the right one until the show!

I stopped by François’ shop to pick up my grille shell that was back from the platers. The Formula One car is done and ready to fly out to Italy for its show at the Ferrari Factory. It’s a shame you can’t see all the great engineering under the engine cover. Like I said before, it’s more fun to see this car at François’ shop when it was all apart than all covered up at a show!

Sharing space behind the F-1 car was a relative newcomer to François’ shop, a 250 GTE. Gary contacted me over a year ago to see if François could sort out his car, and it’s been getting the François treatment since last winter. Just as he was about to send out the GTE, François test drove the car only to find the overdrive solenoid had stopped working.

Luckily, François’ electrical guy was available to stop by and make the repair so the delay was not too long.

This car has a vinyl covered dash and a color matched knee padding which is probably not original, but the rest of the car looks to be in great shape.

The engine compartment looks pretty well sorted, and should provide a nice summer of touring. Have fun with it Gary!

Speaking of sorted engine compartments, François and I got into a discussion about acorn nuts. My car had a handful of nuts that looked like the one in the right side of this picture. François informed me that these were incorrect for any Ferrari as they were replacement nuts once sold the now defunct FAF in Georgia. It must have been a popular item, as I’ve seen dozens of these acorn nuts on other cars. The correct nut is the one in the center of the picture, and the finish is nickel plated. The FAF nuts were chrome or stainless. Mine were probably chromed as they are all now rusting! François said the left acorn nut is another reproduction, and is not quite correct as the shoulder is different. For cars manufactured in the early 70s, like the C/4 and Daytona, there is even another acorn nut that has a shallower hex head. I’ll have to cover these in a future post. If anyone can shed more light on this topic, please e-mail me!

As soon as I got home, I roughly assembled my grille and placed it in the car to take a look. I was pretty excited, but there was a lot of work yet to be done to get the grille mounted, so stay tuned!

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