365GTC/4 Booster



I’ve had a 365GTC/4 at the shop for some time and I can’t wait to send it home! The delay has been waiting for a brake booster rebuild.

To review the story, after sorting out the fuel and ignition system, we found the brakes didn’t seem to be working properly. The booster didn’t seem to be working, so the brakes weren’t stopping the car effectively. When I disassembled the booster, I found a broken piece. What started out as a routing brake booster rebuild turned into a hunt for a replacement part! A billet aluminum piece is available in Italy, but at over $1000 bucks, I found a solution at a fraction of that cost by calling in a favor from a friend that cannibalized one out of another unit!

After showing the owner the original can of the booster, he decided it was worth having it re-plated since he had gone this far into the work. I sent the booster to my plater asking for a rush on it, and it still took 3 weeks!

Waiting so long for the plating was a small price to pay because I seem to have finally got the gold cad plating to look correct. Not only is getting regular cadmium plating harder and harder to find, it’s even harder to get gold cad plating to look right. It’s a process that I’ve developed with my plater that starts with the cleaning and stripping of the original plating, surface prep of the bare steel, and the amount of gold dye the plater applies. Although I don’t know if I will ever get it to look exactly as the original cans because the old plating was done on virgin steel, I feel our results are pretty good.

The brakes are now working great, and I can finally send this car home!