driving one of these great machines

[Al Pezzella]

I feel like I have to share this with you guys after all the help you have given me.
The past two years I've spent a couple thousand hours restoring my 330. I've had it on the road for about eight months but have had some issues. After rebuilding the motor to have a persisting water pump leak in which to resolve I had to pull the motor out and run it on the bench to really understand what the problem was. Well I resolved that problem. After running the motor in the car for a couple of weeks it developed an oil leak that had me concerned. Again pull the motor out and found out that an O ring failed that was on the stud that holds the main bearing. Fixed that. I kept on burning electronic igniters out every 2 hours of running time, I must of had the distributors out about ten times trying to find the problem which turned out to be a bad connection on the fuse box for the wire feeding the coils. Anyway I feel like I always had to do things more than once to find the problem.
After I had all of these things fixed, I've been driving the car for a few months, but I was never happy because I felt some vibrations. I started with the driveshaft, had it balanced, changed the flex joint and that took care of some vibration, but I still had a bad vibration coming from the engine. When we rebuild the engine, we send out the flywheel to be resurfaced but i felt that the vibration was coming from there. Take the interior apart again, pull the trans and send out the flywheel and clutch to be balanced. I got a call from the shop and the machinist told me that the flywheel wanted to jump off his machine when he spun it. The shop that resurfaced it must of not set it up correctly and took enough material off of one side to really screw it up. We had to machine it first and then balance it.
Well I now I bored you guys but this is what I wanted to say. Yesterday on my 50th birthday, I finished putting the car back together and took it for a ride. It brought me back in time, I remember I was 7 or 8 and my dad came home with a new Alfa Super TI and we took it on the Autostrada, he was doing about 190k and I thought it was the greatest day. Well yesterday when I took my car out, I thought it was 1967 and I just came out of the Ferrari dealer with my brand new car, it was great, it drove beautiful, sounded great and I had the dumbest grin on my face, I din't want to go home, just wanted to keep on driving. We are fortunate to have one of these great machines.
Thanks to all your help guys, it was worth it.
Al Pezzella

[zac]

Congratulations Al !!!

sometimes the longest journeys are the most rewarding

Zac

[tyang]

Hi Al,

The rewards are so much greater when you solve them yourself! Congratulations!

Tom