A Dino arrived at my shop the other day, and it’s a new car to me and a new customer. I’m not sure how he found me, but he asked if I would be interested in taking. a look at this newly purchased car. I often feel a post-purchase inspection is hard way to start a client relationship, but it also takes the stress out of me if I had performed the pre-purchase inspection, and found something I missed on a closer look! Luckily, I didn’t find anything egregiously wrong, so there were no surprises to the excited owner of this 246GTS.

The first thing I found under that car that needed immediate attention under the car was some cracking around the bridge pipe between the fuel tanks.

There are two of these soft hoses that connect a center hard pipe to the two fuel tanks. The second one was not as bad as the first one, but a closer look showed small cracks forming in the rubber.

We caught this potential problem just in time, because as I removed the worst of the two hoses, it was cracked all the way through. If this hose were to leak, it would have dumped the whole contents of the fuel system onto the floor as it’s the lowest point of the fuel system. I’ve heard stories of owners walking into their garages with about 20 gallons of fuel drained onto their floor while they were away. Check your hoses!

Waiting for the hoses to arrive in the mail, I took a closer look at the windshield wipers. The owner wants to have a reliable driver, and although we drive our cars mostly in dry conditions, when you need the wipers, they need to work! When I went through the electrical system on this car, I found the wiper motor was struggling and not capable of moving the wiper arms. From the over spray I found on the wiper assembly, I had my suspicions of the problem.

It turned out the wiper arms were almost seized and causing a lot of drag on the wiper motor. I suspected the wiper mechanisms were left in place when this car was painted and the dust and sanding debris worked its way into the shafts. After disassembling the parts, and lubricating the moving parts, I had the wipers working again. Even though this car may not see a lot of rain, if there ever is any wet weather, the wipers will be ready!