A 1964 Ferrari 250 GTL, or more commonly known as a Lusso, arrived at my shop a couple of weeks ago. I inspected this car a few years ago for the current owner when he bought it, and it went down south to its new home. Francois worked on this car for a previous owner and so it was nice to have it back in the Northeast for some work.

The owner asked me to fix a few things on this car, but the first problem was to get it started. The electric fuel pump wasn’t working, so the carbs weren’t getting enough fuel to fill the float bowls. The quickest fix was to give the fuel pump a light hammer hit to the body, and this method got the fuel pump to start clicking, but fuel still didn’t flow very well to the carburetors. I removed the pump, checked and cleaned the points, but found another issue.

The diaphragm was the original red FISPA material (that hasn’t been available for years) had hardened and formed a crack. A new diaphragm was installed, the pump re-installed, and the car started.

While I was under the car, I noticed a wet spot under the fuel tank. The staining in the paint showed this leak was weeping fuel for a while and not at a high rate, but definitely emanating from one spot.

Cleaning up the wet spot, I found the leak was coming from a small crack near a rivet. The fuel tank is riveted and soldered together and it looked like one of these rivets was leaking. There are two ways to fix this, one is to patch it with an epoxy gas tank sealer, or two, pull the tank, and have this rivet soldered. Patches usually hold for a while, but eventually leak, but these days, it’s getting harder to find people who do this kind of repair. That will be my next challenge!

You can watch the fuel repairs and a little assessment of the details on this car for Concours Judging. The owner would like to get this car a little closer to perfect and asked me to go over the details I saw needing correction. Thanks for watching and if you have any questions, put your comments below the video on my channel.