I finished the polishing of the door panel trim that I started last week by doing the same proceedure with the left door panel. Taking these panel apart takes patience and has it’s own little challenges. I’m often faced with hours of time fixing and cleaning pieces that seems excessive, but in defense of our time, there are little details that can hold things up.

One of these examples are these special T-shaped bolts that slide into blind slots behind the trim strip that hold the piece to the door panel. Scaglietti must have threaded the securing nuts and washers onto the bolts and cut the bolts flush with door panel with something like a bolt cutter. You can just make out the deformed end of the bolt in this picture. When restoring the door panel, these bolts are reused, but sometimes the nuts don’t want to come off or go back on because the end of the bolt is deformed from bolt cutters used years ago. Spending time to get the nuts back on to these fasteners is just one example of the time it takes to restore one of these hand made cars. On a another note, when new panels are made during a restoration, the thickness of the panel board is crucial so these bolts will still be long enough since they were trimmed to the old thickness. Upholsterers that have never done an old Ferrari will eventually learn about these issues that hard way, but how do you think I learned?

New lenses were ordered for the interior lights to replace the ones that melted from excessive heat. The holder for these bulbs can take different wattages, and I found 10 watt bulbs fitted to the holders. With the amount of melting, this was probably too hot of a bulb. We had 5 watt bulbs that I managed to fit to the holder by bending the tabs to hold the smaller bulb. This hopefully was an easy solution for an expensive mistake by a previous owner.

The stickers from Kilimanjaro Designs came in the mail this week, and I got right to work applying them to the various areas on the car. We had a couple of Koni stickers at the shop, but needed a couple more to complete the set. The SAFA sticker was for the battery to make it period correct, and the Bonaldi sticker was for the newly plated brake booster. The Pirelli sticker was one that brings a lot of discussion up at my shop. Francois, my boss, worked at the Ferrari factory serving apprenticeships in the 60s, and assembled many of the models we work on when they were new. He remembers many of the details he was taught at the Factory and he implements many of them today. When it came to heater hoses where these Pirelli stickers were found, Francois remembers pulling several meters of heater hose off large rolls stocked at the Factory. Every dozen or so meters would there be a Pirelli label on this hose, so for a car to have even one sticker would not be so common, let alone two. This seems very logical, but when showing these cars, could we afford NOT to have one of these stickers? I laugh at the cars that show up at a Concours with pairs of these stickers lined up perfectly with an adjacent hose, but I still get a lot of grief from Francois whenever I order even one sticker from Kilimajaro Designs!

As we complete each corner of the engine compartment with detailing, I keep stepping back to make sure I have not missed anything. Just in this picture there are many items we have corrected:

1. new clear vinyl crankcase vent hose.

2. correct clamps for the vent hose

3. correct negative battery clamp and ground wire routed correctly

4. correctly plated cheney clamp for the dry sump oil tank

5. correct battery sticker

6. correct wing nuts for battery hold down

7. re routed spark plug wires for a cleaner look

8. correct cad plating on distributor cap screws and black oxide for the spring washers

9. removed rubber trim around engine compartment pinch weld (Pininfarina built cars have a plastic trim piece, but Scaglietti built cars have nothing)

If you see anything missing or incorrect, please let me know, but it’s amazing when you start listing all the details how many there are!

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