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!

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!