Daytonas
It’s funny how we will get a run of the same model Ferrari at the shop for a couple of months, and right now it seems to be Daytonas.
The red one with the white nose had an electrical issue that was causing the cooling fans and horns to stop working. I listened to the owner tell me the problem and tried to use the story as clues to the source of the problem. He told me both items stopped working about the same time, and actually fixed themselves one warm day in the summer but stopped working shortly thereafter. Very rarely does a problem with a car “fix itself” so I kept listening. The horn and fan circuits are on separate fuses, so they may or may not have be related, but I made a note to myself.
I started by checking the easiest thing first which was the fuses. Nothing was blown, and the fuse junctions were in decent shape without any diconnections or signs of overheating. I grounded out the temperature sender circuit and nothing happened, so I turned my focus to the power feed to the fans. As I probed the fuse block, I noticed a flicker in the test light as I tried the circuit. Aha!
This car had a replacement fuse junction block installed and as I probed the associated circuits, there was an intermittent fault. On closer inspection I found a cold solder joint at a bridge bar in the fuse block. With vibration and heat, this cold solder joint eventually cracked and caused the cooling fans AND the horn to stop working! A simple re-soldering of the bridge bar was done and we were back in business. Anything that would prevent me from chasing down further into an electrical system is a good for me. I love easy fixes!
The light blue Daytona needed a new radiator core and it’s back from the radiator shop with a new core ready for paint and re-installation.
A third Daytona will be at the shop when I get these two out when we will be reinstalling a Gearbox after we replaced some seals and some internal parts. Three Daytonas in a month, that’s a lot of Daytonas!
With so many Daytonas in the shop, that doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten about the 330s! Yale’s engine installed and ready for break in and driving, but we found a lot of smoke the last time we started the car. Instead of coming from the newly rebuilt engine, we found the source of the smoke was coming from all the oil in the exhaust system when the engine first blew! Francois and I have been trying to find a way to get all the oil out of the mufflers and baffles inside the length of the exhaust. Besides the environmental disposal of the solvent to wash this oil out, anything we use will collect in the internal insulation and smoke when the hot exhaust heats it up.
For starters, we set the oil filled exhaust system on end to drain for a few days. It’s been a little warm in the Northeast so the oil is flowing, but I would have preferred 70s-80s than 40s-50s. I was amazed how much oil drained out of the system already, but we have some more to go!
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