I was working on a Ferrari 212 at my shop and saw a slight weeping of fuel out of the fuel tank. I cleaned the area up and gave it a few hours, and the seeping continued. Unfortunately, the right way to repair this leak was to remove the tank.

Having never removed a tank from a 212 before, it soon became obvious it needed to come out from inside the trunk, so all the panels and carpeting had to come out first.

The fuel sender was disconnected and I took out the sender to check if it was working properly and drained the tank.

The tank came out with relative ease and was ready to take to my gas tank repair guy who would see if he could solder up the leak.

Another leak I found was with one of the lever shocks. These Houdaille shocks were common in early Ferraris and even Ford Model As from the 30s! On closer inspection three out of the four shocks were leaking so I removed all four of them and sent them out for inspection and resealing.

While removing the shocks and sending photographs to the owner of the work, he noticed how the exhaust headers were looking a little crusty. Back when Francois was restoring this car, high temperature exhaust paint was the usual finish applied to the headers, but it quickly burns off. I coated my headers on the 330 America about 25 years ago with a new high temp ceramic coating that still looks new to this day. Today, high temp ceramic exhaust coatings are widely available, and can be done locally instead of shipping across the country.

I removed the headers and hand delivered them to the coating vendor instead of risking shipping these bulky and awkward pieces in the mail.

I had a set of headers I wanted to send out for high temp ceramic coating. It’s a process that I highly recommend as I coated the exhaust headers on my 330 America over 25 years ago, and they still look like they were done yesterday. Years ago, the only place that offered this service was Jet-Hot, and I had to package the headers, ship them out, and wait for their return. Today, there are shops that offer this process locally, and I have one within a reasonable drive away. Although shipping parts is a normal occurrence in any business, I always prefer hand delivering parts to insure they don’t get lost or damaged when shipped. Some of these parts are irreplaceable, and a little effort on my part can save some future heartache!

Before I could take these headers out for shipping, I had to fix a stripped bolt that used to secure the exhaust shield that covers the header. It looks like someone tried to fix this sheared bolt by attempting to drill it out, but the drill bit walked off the top of the bolt. Luckily, they stopped before making more damage, but left the repair for me to fix!

The attempted repair failed probably because they were using a hand drill, and it is nearly impossible to drill down the center of a sheared bolt without some help. I had a lot better chance succeeding with the header off the car, and a welder to add more material to drill. There were two ways to fix this problem, one was to try and extract the original bolt, or two, weld and cut a new hole and tap new threads. I decided to pick option two since this bolt was not critical in it’s purpose and just needed a decent hole with threads to work.

After grinding away the weld flush with the surface of the hole, I had a nice flat area to center punch a new hole. If I got it in the same position as the original hole, great, but it wasn’t necessary for all this to work.

The next decision was where was I going to mount this header to drill my hole? My Bridgeport would have been the sexiest way to drill an accurate hole, but fixuring it to the bed may have taken longer than mounting it to my drill press. I found my drill press vice was just large enough to hold the header firmly in place, and small enough to allow clearance for the pipes to hang below the table.

I made quick work of drilling a new hole and tapping new M6x1.0 threads in the stanchion. Next, the header goes out for ceramic coating!

I went to south Florida in February this year to attend Cavallino and try to win an elusive Platinum Award for this green Ferrari 330 GTC. You may remember this car from the last couple of years meeting the owner, inspecting the car, agreeing to prepare the car for Cavallino, and showing it last year. We missed the mark by a thin margin, spent the last year correcting the final faults, and this year tried one last time to get it across the line!

Cavallino, which was held at the Breakers in Palm Beach Florida for over 30 years moved to a new venue, The Boca Raton, an hour drive down the intercoastal waterway along the Atlantic. The Breakers was renovating and Canossa, the owner of Cavallino signed a three year contract with The Boca Raton, a private resort and golf course.

As with any new venue, there was a lot of teething pains. I tried my best to be patient and understanding the volunteers were as much in the dark on the new layout as I was, but hopefully they will get better with years to come.

There were 6 330 GTCs in our class, which was the largest single model collection of Vintage Ferraris than any other class. Even though cars are judged individually, having such good examples in a row made showing the green 330 that much harder. I believe the strong turn out belongs largely to Clete Gardenhour, a judge and owner of a GTC. Many years ago, Clete showed his personal GTC at a Ferrari show and won and award, but continued to correct the details on his car. The following year, he returned to receive a lower score and no award at all. His disgust was and is a common occurrence in showing a car at a Concours, but instead of simply complaining, Clete took it upon himself to create a concours guide specifically for Ferrari 330GTCs, and make it available to everyone. He tirelessly collected information, and confirmed the details with many restorers, owners, and historians. I was honored to be included as one of his resources, but this guide would not have been made without Clete’s dedication.

Other people have created guides for other models, but they are not nearly as thoroughly researched, updated, and referenced as Clete’s guide, so when I got the ribbon designating a win at Cavallino, not only did I have a long list of people to thank, I know it also came from a lot of hard work from the judges, restorers, and volunteers that put this show together.

Chas, the owner of this car couldn’t attend Cavallino this year due to the later date of the event over Valentine’s Day Weekend, but I did my best to show the car in his stead. I was so happy for the owner to have brought this car across the Platinum line. We started this journey with a nice car, but not up to Platinum Standards. I knew there were some every expensive repairs needed to make this car perfect, but I wanted to take a pragmatic approach towards winning. I took on the challenge collecting all the necessary points that we could correct, with an eye for the most return in points over cost. Platinum show judging has gotten so competitive, that often times only ground up restorations are the only way to win a Platinum, but I wanted to prove we could do it without that expense.

Our hard work and commitment paid off, and now Chas has a nice car and a Platinum award to be proud of. Thanks Everyone!

You can watch the Cavallino Experience in this YouTube video, and the story about the car that didn’t make the mark!

An interesting car arrived at my shop on a cold January morning. There was 20 inches of snow on the ground and the temps were hovering around 20 degrees.

The car was a 1951 Ferrari 212 that was once owned by David Letterman. This car seems to have gone full circle because I’ve known about this car for over 30 years. I had started working for Late Show with David Letterman in 1993 as an Audio Engineer, and Francois had started working for Letterman on his Ferraris a few years earlier. As fate would have it, we met each other through Ferraris and our connection has grown into a friendship and career that lasted well beyond our former employer!

Back in the mid 90s, Letterman was asked to show his Ferrari 212 in NYC for a show that was held in Midtown Manhattan at Rockefeller Center, and I tagged along to the show. When we were asked to drive the car across the reviewing stand, I jumped in the back seat for a ride!

The car was finished by Francois after bringing it back from the West Coast. Letterman bought the car to restore, and the restoration out in California was dragging on. Francois advised him to bring the car to his shop in Connecticut to assemble the engine and finish the car. As Dave and Francois bought more Ferraris, and this car was finished, Dave realized he preferred the “newer” Ferraris he added to his collection, from a Daytona, Boxer, and a Lusso. This car languished in Dave’s collection and eventually was sold to Dana Mecum.

The current owner bought the car at auction this year, after researching the car, and discussing the history of the car with me. He liked the story, and decided to bid on the car. These early Ferraris were built in the company’s infancy with the Factory only open for a few years. Ferrari was using several body builders in Italy to design and shape the bodies on their chassis and engine combination, and this particular was was built by Ghia. Some felt the shape of this particular cars was not as sexy as some of the designs of other car built by Touring, Vignale, or Pininfariana, but the lines of this car definitely speak the vernacular of the 50s.

This car has been bouncing around the auction circuit for the past 3 years, moving on and off trucks, started, run for a short time, and parked, so I had to make a list of things that needed to be addressed to make this car road worthy again. I found an exhaust pipe that had cracked at the weld that needed attention.

There was some weeping at the fuel tank that I will have to investigate. Hopefully it’s a loose fitting or breather hose instead of a crack in the tank!

I also saw some fluid leaking from one of the rear brake drums.

Removing the drum, I found red gear oil leaking down from the axle seal. From the trails of dirt, I could see this slow leak was happening for a while.

The drums were surprisingly clean with only a light coating of oil.

The brake shoes will have to be cleaned, but first I wanted to remove the hub to get to the source of the leak.

I will get a new seal and install it, but I also plan to change out the rear differential oil. I spoke to Francois about the service on the rear axle, and he told me this was done while the car was in California. The oil looked fine, but I felt was too thin and improper for a Ferrari rear axle. Ferraris specify a very thick rear axle oil, and the oil installed in this axle seemed like synthetic gear oil with very low viscosity. Thicker oil and a new seal should remedy this leak.

I drained the engine oil and found the usual signs of no mileage and short time running with it being pretty dark. Hopefully with new fluids and a thorough service, this car will see more mileage in the next year than it did in the 30 years Letterman owned it!

While I have a 246 Dino at the Painter, I wanted to address a problem with the seats. This car has very low mileage, and leather seats were a rare option that originally came with this car. Dinos came with several options with vinyl as standard. There were also cloth, leather, and Daytona style seats with the contrasting stripes as options.

These seats are in pretty good shape considering their age of 50 plus years, but some of the stitching had broken, and I wanted to try a repair. The first step was to moisturize the leather with some leather conditioner. Every time this car comes to my shop, I treat it with leather conditioner, and the seats happily absorb the treatment, but I needed to get the leather as supple as I could for this repair.

I could tell this seat had not completely been disassembled in all of its life, and I wanted to try my best to only repair what was necessary to preserve its originality. Going too far could irreversibly damage the seat and force me to replace parts that will lose it’s originality, not going far enough would not make these seats any better. It was a fine line of work I had planned.

The biggest decision was whether to replace the foam. The original foam in these seats was a latex foam, I believe made from natural rubber. As it ages and is exposed to air, it dries out and crumbles to dust. Many Vintage Ferraris suffer from this fate, and you can see the dust spread all over the carpets as the seats get used. Replacing this foam would require further disassembly of the seat and the risk of destroying the original leather. As bad as this foam looked, I believed I could save most of it and rebuild the bottom half of the seat cushion with modern polyurethane foam. Covering the bottom half of the seat with new foam and sealing it from the outside air may help preserve the original latex foam from deteriorating as fast.

The lower support straps were stiff and no longer elastic, so those would have to be replaced.

Having done this work before, I had the correct strapping material and hog rings to do the job.

The labor intensive part of the job was to hand stitch the leather pleats back together. Going back through each hole made by the sewing machine was the only way to pull the pleats back together without further weakening the leather. There were hundreds of holes to sew, so I put on my magnifying lenses, broke out my curved needle, and got to work!

I’ve been getting the blue SII 330GT 2+2 ready to ship to my upholsterer’s shop to complete the interior. There were a bunch of little things to address before the car went, but having the car on the ground and moving under it’s own power was a big milestone!

The new upholsterer is doing a great job dissecting the old seats, making new patterns, sewing up new covers, rebuilding the foam cushions, and fitting them to the seat frames.

I’ve been traveling down to his shop to inspect the work, and advising on the overall shape and look I’d like to see on Vintage Ferrari seats. The results so far look great.

I had to get to work on cleaning and painting the sub assemblies like seat rails so the interior can be assembled. This picture showed how SII 330s covered the seat adjuster rod with a thin piece of leather to finish off the steel rod. What’s interesting is some cars had this leather covering matching the color of the seat leather, while others used black leather. Since we’re changing the color of the original of the leather to a darker color, we will have to decide if we will go with black leather or the tobacco leather to cover this rod.

Now was the time to polish the knobs for the seat adjusters.

I tried my best to sort through the electrics in this car before the upholstery was installed to avoid having the take things apart. When I originally took the gauges out of the car, I labeled all the wiring as it was unplugged, but as I finally plugged everything back in and powered up the dash, I found some problems. Since this car was not running when I started the disassembly, I had no idea someone had re-wired some of the gauge wires, so plugging them back in as I found them showed that the last person who was in there had made a mistake or created a problem. Unfortunately, that meant I had to take the gauges back out and fix these problems and decipher what they did. This is very common on a project car that was not running when a restoration is started, but by the end of the day, I had it figured out!

Although I had the electric window motors working properly along with the wiring to the switches, I found both switch contacts having problems. I’ll send these switches out for rebuilding, and probably relay them to cut down on the current that passes through these switched to avoid burning them out again!

Since the seats to this car were at the upholsterer’s shop getting recovered, I installed a spare seat bottom I had at my shop as a temporary seat so the car could be driven a little safer. I tried to move the car sitting on the floor, but it was too low to drive the car safely, so I bolted this seat cushion in for now.

New carpets, headliner, and door panels can’t really be installed or fabricated until the upholsterer has the car. I am often asked if ready-made kits that are sold online are any good, and I often say they’re not good enough for my tastes. Custom cutting the carpets, and fitting the door cards precisely to each panel insures all the gaps are even and covering the floor pans underpayment. These were all hand made cars, so no two cars are exactly the same. Saving some time or money buying a ready made kit is too much of risk to see an ugly gap or poorly fitting panel for eternity!

Although most of you who have followed this website and other media platforms know my story, I did an interview with a friend on mine Sean Smith who writes for Hagerty Online.

Ferrari Mentorship and the Path to Expertise: An Interview with Tom Yang

The interview talked about how the journey in cars started, and how it led up to working on Ferraris full time today. It was a circuitous route, but I followed my passions, and luckily ended up here with you!

Thank you to everyone who contributed to the 2025 Annual Fund Drive. Your contribution goes a long way to confirm I’m still creating content that you appreciate. As my reach grows on the various platforms, it would seem there would be other revenue sources, but you’d be surprised how little funds come in! The good thing is my motivation to share all this content is more because of the love of these cars, and the excitement I have in having you along for the ride. Thanks for your support!

if you missed the fund drive, it’s never too late!

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

As I look forward to 2026, it’s always nice to look back at 2025 and remind myself all that I accomplished. I created this video to look back at 2025. I can only imagine what 2026 has to offer!

I helped the owner of this Lusso buy this car a couple years ago and he sent it back to me for some mechanical upgrades.

He plans of taking this car on rallies and one thing that is lacking on a Lusso is an overdrive gear for high speed driving. If there was ever one thing wrong with a Lusso it would be this lack of overdrive for an otherwise beautiful car!

One solution was to use a kit supplied by a supplier in the UK that adds a mechanical gear set to the rear section of the Ferrari transmission. Some people have added a Laycock overdrive to the transmission, the same found on GTEs, but this modification adds a 5th gear without an extra switch or hydraulics and overdrive is achieved with a seamless shift off the lever in a conventional H-pattern. This kit is supposed to be “plug and play,” but we’ll see. I’ll be building this transmission as soon as I pull this gear box out!

Here’s a video of the process of removal.

Thank you to everyone who has contributed to the December Fund Drive. Your contribution helps in more ways than you know. I’ve kept this website going for over 2 decades and watched the Internet change throughout the years and had to work to keep up with the change. Not only do I have to host this website on a server that can contain the gigabytes of data I have collected through the years, I also have to keep on top of the random attacks that the Internet offers all the time. Recently, I’ve seen an increase of traffic not from physical viewers, but from bots that have been scraping websites for information to use as its own. Every time you use a google search and you get an AI answer, that data comes from websites like mine that spent years building data. How and why to stop that mining for data for all the AI servers is still up for debate, but it has to be addressed due to the increase of traffic that may not actually serve my world Vintage Ferrari Owners and Fans. These are just a few of the things that happen in the background as you use this website and media I produce, so your contributions help me continue doing what I do without feeling other resources are using my data for free.

It’s just a couple more weeks of this fund drive, so if you have not contributed, please do so and I won’t bother you for another year! Thanks Everyone!

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

My Ferrari Restoration/Repair Shop is attached to a much larger building next door. I bought this building a decade ago with Restore as a tenant. They are a Habitat for Humanity business that resells used furniture and building supplies, a kind of thrift store for your home. They decided last year to move to another location in my county, and I now have the opportunity to repurpose this space. I could have inserted another commercial tenant, but I’ve always wanted to use this space for car storage. I spent the last year working on a business plan, looking at my finances, applying for a loan, and proposing to the town my plans for the new business venture. Restore moved out in November, and I am now left with a 14,000 square building to make my vision a reality.

The neat thing about this space is it originally was built in the 1970s as a roller rink, so the whole building has hardwood floors! It’s a little worse for the wear, but I believe with a little bit of refinishing, it will be fine for parking cars. The floors are installed over a concrete slab, and when I first bought the building, I used a small portion of this space to put some cars inside.

My vision is to create a climate controlled space for collector cars with an area for renters to use as a club space. Security access to the building will allow renters to enter and exit the building. I plan to pave the space around the building where the occasional car meet can be hosted, but first the most important thing is to install a fire suppression system in the building. Inspections, proposals, engineering, and approvals all have to happen before a system is installed, so that will be a big part of work for the next few months.

I also have about 14,000 square feet of wood floors to address! The finish has been worn off in spots, but I don’t plan on refinishing the floor back to it’s original roller skating rink condition. I would like to seal the bare wood so any fluid drips won’t damage the wood even further but some surface prep will be needed. I will be spending all my time in the next few months working on this floor!

I’m excited and frightened with this new business I’m planning. I think this is a financially viable business, provided I take the steps to make it a safe, secure, and enjoyable space to store someone’s collector car. The population of my area has grown in the past several years with many people choosing to make the New York Hudson Valley a place for a permanent or weekend home, and I’ve seen the change in the car community because of this. I hope opening a collector car storage facility in Hudson NY will serve this need!

I’ll provide the hard work, I just need you to wish me luck!

Here’s a video of the space and the outside area of the building.

Thank you so much for all those who have contributed to my annual fund drive. Your support helps me make plans for the future and include space and events for the Vintage Ferrari Community. I’m excited about this project, and hope you are too with the hope to invite you to join me in the near future at a Vintage Ferrari Event hosted by Hudson Valley Car Storage!

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