As the work continued on the GTC I have at my shop, I discussed addressing some of the oil leaks on this engine. It’s a low mileage car with signs that this engine may never have been apart. The oil pressure and power seem fine, but some of the original gaskets are just not sealing anymore. There are leaks in the front of the engine and also in the back, but the front ones would need an engine out to seal, so we decided to address the rear leaking first which started with the rear main seal. On GTCs, this required sliding the transaxle back to remove the clutch and flywheel.

I could tell someone had been in here once before to try and stop some of the leaking. Not only was the rear main seal leaking, but oil was dripping past the rear main bearing cap. There’s a large o-ring that seals the upper oil pan to the block that looks like is leaking and someone tried to seal it with RTV. I was able to pull the loose RTV out by hand so it wasn’t doing it’s job anymore.

Getting this o-ring would also necessitate removing the engine, so the next best option would be to clean this area up as best as possible and reapply RTV. I don’t expect this repair to last for very long, but some of the new RTVs may stem the leaks a little while longer.

With everything back together, I took the GTC out for a final shakedown drive. I had done a lot of work on this car, and I wanted to make sure everything was working properly before booking transport for this car to head back to North Carolina, but the car had other ideas. Before I even left my shop, I noticed fuel dripping out from the back of the car. This car had an aftermarket fuel regulator installed along with an auxiliary fuel pump out back, and fuel was dripping out of the regulator. The car has been with me for a few months, and not a single drop came out of this regulator until now. I put the car back on the lift, removed the fuel regulator to have a closer look.

Upon disassembly, I found the diaphragm brittle and cracked, allowing fuel to leak out of the fuel system. On one hand, I was baffled with the timing on why it chose to fail now when I thought I was finally done with this car, and on another hand, I was glad it happened so I could fix it before the car left. I would have hated to have had this car go all the way back to the owner, only to have a new fuel leak that needed repairs!

Here’s a video of the final drive of the NC GTC.

Thank you to all the people who have contributed to the Annual Pledge drive. This year’s pledge drive is even more important than any of the years before because of a big change coming to my shop next year. I don’t want to leave you all in suspense for too long, but I will be sharing details next week. Your contribution will help me through this big project I’m working on, so I can’t thank you enough.

Some of you have asked me to post my mailing address for contributions, TOMYANG.NET LLC, PO Box 36, Hollowville, NY 12530. Thanks!

I also would like to thank those who took the time to email and let me know they’re out there and still reading the blog. This website and blog has always been to share my life in cars and Vintage Ferraris, and I’ve enjoyed being a part of your internet life, so it’s nice to hear it directly from followers. Some of you have told me you don’t go directly to YouTube to see the videos, and click on the links only when I provide them here. I’ll try to do it more often, but sometimes the content does not coincide on the same timeline. The ebb and flow of content creation for the videos and blog posts don’t often match up, so the content I post to one may not make sense to link to the blog. Since I’ve made concerted effort to create videos on YouTube a few years ago, I have now created a catalog of over a hundred videos with the hopes to post a new one every week. I apologize if that reflects in less blog posts here to this website, but that is not because there is less Ferrari Content, but but more if you subscribe to YouTube!

Thank you for consuming my Vintage Ferrari Content in whatever medium you choose, and look forward to more “stuff” in the future!

It’s that time of the year that I post a pledge drive for this website and other Vintage Ferrari Content. Your ongoing support keeps me growing this community of Vintage Ferrari fans, professional mechanics, owners, and hobbyists. Believe it or not, even though I’ve been creating Vintage Ferrari Content for decades, I still make very little actual money from all this work! Don’t get me wrong, I benefit in so many other ways that monetizing all this media was never a priority. I’ve managed to build a new career working on Vintage Ferraris, document how to repair and maintain Ferraris, share the experience of Vintage Ferrari ownership, and create a community of like minded Vintage Ferrari Enthusiasts. I am proud of what I have done, despite the thousands of hours of unpaid work!

I’m sure you all know and see the media landscape is changing. When this blog was created over 25 years ago, the term “blog” hadn’t even been popularized! Today, we have so much more access to media with content being pushed directly to our phones. I’ve been watching the traffic to this website decline through the years as people are more and more distracted with content accessible through their mobile devices. Fewer and fewer people visit websites, or click bookmarks on their Internet browsers. In order for me to reach the changing access to content, I started creating videos and content for social media, but continue to post to the blog. I really enjoy making videos, and found them to be another creative outlet for all the Vintage Ferrari Content I experience on a daily basis, but feel there is a permanence to the content I post and control on my website. It’s been a challenge to commit time to all these projects, while still juggling family life and commitments!

As technology continues to evolve, we’re seeing more AI generated content flood the internet. Their content creation comes from data it gathers from the Internet, and I have even seen traffic grow on my website again, not from actual people, but “AI bots” gathering 25 years of Vintage Ferrari Content to repackage and present as its own in web searches. It’s pretty frustrating seeing this use for the benefit of AI without credit, while they profit from this data. As this technology continues to advance, we’ll see more and more data being used to create content without much control because I’ve always made my website free.

Vintage Ferrari content has always been a niche subject, and I continue to create it because I genuinely enjoy doing it. Your support helps me navigate this world of the Internet knowing you value my work, and appreciate a place where real content is being created by a real person, and I thank you !

I’d be curious about your thoughts on where you enjoy seeing Vintage Ferrari Content. Do you still enjoy the blog? Do you see the weekly videos I post to YouTube, or do you only click on them when I post links on this blog? The data seems to show very little clicking to the videos, but I’d love to hear it from the people who visit this site. I sometimes feel like I’m creating a late night radio show broadcasting into the ether not knowing how many people are actually hearing me. I know from the traffic that is not necessarily true, but I would love to hear from you directly about your thoughts on where you consume your Ferrari media, and what you like to see. Send me an email.

I continued sorting out this original unrestored Ferrari 330GTC at my shop, and I noticed the valve train seemed a little noisier on one side than the other. When a Ferrari is idling, there are all sorts of noises coming from the engine. Intake noise, exhaust noise, chain noise, and that’s not including things that could be broken! As the engine warms up, some of the valve train noises go away because metal expands as it warms, so listening to the differences helps discern normal noises and problem noises. Audio can also be very subjective, so I have to keep an open mind on what I hear, and not jump to conclusions.

Ferrari recommends valve adjustments at every 8000 miles, and often times with Vintage Cars, that interval can take several years, but can catch an owner off guard if they do a long long road trip or simply forget. The owner of this car said he was about 5000 miles since the last adjustment, but decided to have me take a look inside the engine.

The first problem I encountered when trying to remove the bolts from the valve covers. Two of the shouldered bolts were missing from the set of four that should have been on this car. These are special bolts that Ferrari used to secure the valve covers to the distributor drives in the back of the engine. The regular bolts that were substituted on this engine gave very little clearance to put a wrench on the head, and they were also over tightened. I worked very hard not to round off the head of the wrong bolt because getting these bolts off the back of the engine would have been a big problem.

Despite the $60 dollar price tag to buy two special replacement bolts with the shipping, I told the owner this was absolutely necessary to avoid giving the next guy working on this car the problems I had.

The valve train looked very clean, and it looks like this engine has seen regular oil changes and good maintenance, but I did find a couple of adjusters out of adjustment.

Before I adjust for lash, I remove the adjusters to visually inspect the valve stem, and the tip of the adjuster. In a perfect world, the adjuster tip is supposed to be slightly softer than the tip of the hardened valve stem so as these two surfaces act on one another to push the valve open, if there is any wear, the replaceable tip is the part that can be replaced. I tried to arrange these tips from bad to worse from left to right. The furthest one on the left shows a slight imperfection while the one on the furthest right shows all the hardness of the tip had worn away and the softer supporting structure of the tip was wearing exponentially.

I believe the noisy valve train was from these adjuster tips being out of adjustment, and maybe even the really bad one asking to be replaced! As a mechanic, I hate being accused of up selling work, but I’m really glad we decided to do this valve adjustment a little early!

I’ve been trying to post a new segment to my YouTube Channel called Ferrari Mechanic Struggle of the Week, and I talked about the shouldered bolts on the distributor drives and tool I made to access these bolts. The segment is after the drive I took in a Lusso I have at the shop!

I’ve had this Ferrari 365GTC/4 at my shop for a while. It first came to me with all sorts of issues. The owner had taken it to a show in Miami in poor running condition, and said it had developed an oil leak. By the time it arrived, I had to tow into the shop. The carburetors were clogged, and the ignition needed some sorting, but there was still this issue with the oil. What was described as an oil leak, was actually a oil getting into the coolant, and coming out of the coolant over flow tank.

The strange thing was even though oil was getting into the coolant, there was no exchange of coolant into the oil. I also tested for exhaust gas in the coolant to confirm the head gasket was containing the pressure from the cylinders and not pressurizing the cooling system.

During these tests, the chocolate milk shake mix of oil and water was still being made. I started to suspect the oil cooler in the radiator had perhaps cracked and was making the intermix, and found plugs to bypass the oil cooler, but that made no difference.

Even though I didn’t suspect the water pump, I needed to check to confirm. There is a chamber in the water pump housing that separates the oil from the coolant, but it was dry and showed no signs of intermix. There was a groove that was cut in the water pump shaft sleeve from the oil seal, but it was still sealing. I ordered a new shaft sleeve to avoid future leaks, but this was still not the problem.

The last resort was to pull the engine to investigate the source of the oil getting into the coolant since I seemed to have exhausted all external sources.

Unfortunately, this engine will have to slowly come apart to inspect all the areas that could potentially show how the oil is getting into the coolant. I hope I will find a “smoking gun” that was the cause, but the only way forward is to dive into the disassembly!

I was changing the oil on a Ferrari 330GTC when I found the oil pan plug super tight, and when I went to replace the drain plug, me fears of stress on the oil pan plug came true when the thread pulled out. After years of over tightening the oil pan plug from another shop, the thread decided to pull out on me!

Before getting the threads repaired, I first needed to clean the the oil pan. There was a bunch of sludge and thick oil oil trapped in the baffles that does not drain out at every oil change, and through the years, it builds up in these channels. Now was the the time to clean all this sludge out.

The owner told me the oil pan had always leaked a little, and when I was removing the old gasket material, I could see why. This oil pan had a machined surface on the surface for the gasket, but the grooves were probably allowing a little oil to seep by.

There were deeper gouges from a worn gasket scraper that left some deeper scratches that were also contributing to the leaks. Hopefully a light smear of RTV will help seal this oil pan to the bottom of the sump.

Here’s the video of the process.

I removed the fuel filter assembly on the North Carolina GTC I had at my shop to replace the filter. Normally, it can be done inside the car, but I suspected it was going to need a little more work than just changing the filter.

There was a lot of rust and sediment inside the filter bowl, and the spring at the bottom of the filter housing was rusted in place. It was no longer adding tension to the filter assembly so this may have been the source of the debris getting to the carburetors.

Oftentimes, this the bolt and washer assembly that secures the filter bowl to the upper plate will not clear the chassis during filter change, so the aluminum washer that seals the bolt can’t be replaced. This can be reused a couple of times, but will eventually leak. Pulling the whole assembly out allowed me to put new washer and chance to clean everything up.

I planned to bead blast the interior of the filter bowl after scraping all the old rubber gasket material that had fused to the assembly.

I got a new filter, spring and gasket ready for reassembly. I tried my best to preserve the original markings on the filter housing as it’s only original once.

Sometimes one picture can represent more time than it looks! I wanted to replace the rear transmission mount on the blue 330GT I’m restoring before installing the transmission for the final time. It turns out this silent block bushing is not a very common part, and had to come from Maranello Parts in the UK. I put the order in, and waited a couple of weeks for it to arrive. Knowing better than to cut out the old one until I had the replacement part in my hand, I waited to check all the dimensions to make sure it would fit the transmission before I drilled out the old rubber bushing and cut the old one out. There were several methods to get the old bushing sleeve out, but I opted to cut most of the steel sleeve out with a reciprocating saw just before I touched the aluminum of the transmission body. I made two cuts that relieved some of the holding pressure of the bushing and hammered the collar the rest of the way out. The new one fit a little looser than the original one by just a thousandth or two of an inch, so I used some loctite to hold the bushing in place.

The NC Ferrari 330GTC had some trash in the bowls of the carburetor, and some of it got into an accelerator pump squirter when the car first arrived at the shop, and I felt eventually this trash would get sucked into the rest of the carb and cause problems. The best plan of attack was to clean the carbs out, and change the fuel filters.

The carburetors looked a little dirty, and showed the usual signs of a few leaks over the years.

After a disassembly and ultrasonic cleaning, I got most of the staining off, but more importantly removed the gum and loose debris in the bowls.

On the other side of my shop, I had a fuse panel to clean. No matter how well something is wrapped when a car is painted, it’s inevitable paint over spray, dust, and debris will make it through. I also wanted to clean all the electrical contacts while I was in there to make sure everything was working properly.

I took all the fuses out, cleaned all the contacts, and and made sure the fuses were nice and tight in the holders.

As I was disconnecting each wire and cleaning the connections, I noticed one of the junction blocks was melted and distorted from overheating. This particular junction block connected the main power feed from the battery and distributed it to the rest of the fuse panel, so a deteriorating connection probably caused the top left screw in lug to overheat and melt the holder.

I’ve seen similar junction blocks for sale out there somewhere and put the word out on my YouTube Channel in a new segment call “Ferrari Mechanic Struggle of the Week! I’m trying my best to post to this blog, but I hope you’re seeing the efforts I’m putting into the videos!

Kevin Moak responded immediately and offered to send me a used one that was in perfect shape. Thanks Kevin for your help and generosity. Clint, the owner of this 330 and I very much appreciate the help!

I got a new 330GTC in the shop today that came from North Carolina. The current owner bought this car back in 1984 and has owned it every since!

It looks like an original paint car, and although faded and a little dull, has the honesty of a well used original car.

The engine has the same look and the owner sent the car to me to change out the fuel and oil lines, along with any thing else I might see that this old girl might need to keep her safe and performing onto the future.

The first thing I noticed was the mechanical fuel pump was leaking so I took it out of the car to find a cracked diaphragm. The owner told me it was weeping on occasion, but by the time it arrived in NY, it was leaving a trail of fuel all the way into my shop!

The original check valves were replaced with aftermarket valves, but I was able to find a set of gaskets to fit and seal them, so I replaced what I could to make this fuel pump work again.

The next thing on my list of to-do was to figure out why the fuel gauge wasn’t working. I grounded out the wires to the gauge to make sure it was working properly, but when I removed the sender from the tank, I found the rust on the sender was not passing any voltage to the wiring harness. Rust had gotten between the rivets that secured the electrical contact not allowing any current to flow through the sender. I’ll send this unit out to be completely rebuilt, and we should be back in business!

Here’s the video and test drive of the Ferrari 330GTC. The YouTube videos are starting to get some traction as more people are hearing about them. I’m trying to split my time between creating content to my blog that has been around for more than 25 years, and YouTube/Social Media content. I feel the blog allows me to dive deeper into the repairs than the casual viewership of YouTube, but all the platforms are important to bring Vintage Ferrari Enthusiasts together. Please watch and share my content with your like minded friends so we can keep building this community and grow the next generation!

I’m trying to get the engine installed in the 330GT 2+2 I’m restoring at my shop, but there are so many little details that I have to address before start up. One of them being the starter heat shield that seems to be missing on this car. Luckily, I had one from another 330 at my shop to copy. It clamps to the exhaust headers and protects the starter from the heat of the exhaust.

I fabricated one with similar dimensions, but used a modern fiberglass and aluminum heat shield material than what was probably asbestos on the original piece.

The owner and I decided to install modern cooling fans on his car to aid in the cooling of the 4 fliter engine. I have found the capacity of the cooling system is usually adequate to keep the engine cool in traffic, but it’s the air flow that could use help. Since this car will be living in Florida, it needs as much air flow possible to keep the engine from overheating. Even if this car is driven for pleasure, there will eventually be a time when it will be caught in traffic, and we will be glad we added this measure of safety.

Since this was a non-air conditioned car, there was plenty of room to fit this dual fan set up in front of the radiator. I used some of the original brackets to secure the assembly in place.

I have a brand new reproduction Abarth exhaust ready to install on this car, but I needed to install the exhaust clamps. This car still had the original exhaust clamps attached to the old rotted exhaust, so I was able to salvage them, clean them up, and fit them to the new exhaust. These original style clamps have to be installed on the pipes before the exhaust is installed, so they’re a pain in the butt to work with, but will add that little detail that will make this car period correct!