A Ferrari 275 GTS arrived at my shop this week and it was newly purchased from Gullwing Motorcars in Astoria, NY. A long time customer of mine asked me to go down to NYC to take a look at this car being offered for sale, and I shot a video of the process of inspecting a car for sale.

I found a couple of issues on this car during my inspection and test drive, but generally liked the car. There was a discrepancy on the stamping on the engine number matching the chassis, but I confirmed it was the correct Ferrari engine, only swapped for its original engine many years ago. Decades ago, when someone had an engine problem needing a rebuild or repair, Ferrari shops would often swap out a similar engine for the original one to expedite the repair for the customer. Sometimes, they would even re-stamp the engine to match the chassis as courtesy, but you can imagine the confusion and problems we’re facing years later when these numbers don’t match the original factory documents and internal build sheets. Gullwing was well aware of the discrepancy on this particular car, and discounted the price accordingly. I confirmed the engine was healthy, and felt the mismatched engine was not going to detract from the enjoyment of this convertible V-12 Ferrari, at perhaps a 30% discount! My advice was to buy.

One of the things I found on the car that needed to addressed was the broken window crank on the driver’s side of the car. On closer inspection, I found the window crank shaft had stripped after the internal cable mechanism jammed. Someone forcibly tired to crank down the jammed window, only to strip the internal gears of the crank mechanism.

Luckily, I had a spare window crank mechanism in my spare parts stash that was identical to the one I needed to replace. I just needed to un-string the old cable and transfer it to the replacement spool. I felt there was enough of the old cable that I could successfully re-use it still having enough length to operate the window. I could have replaced the cable, but this one was in good shape and not kinked so I gave it a shot.

I carefully took notes on how the cable was wound on the old spool and how many wraps around the spool it took before exiting the crank frame. I secured the cable on the spool with a zip tie so I could put the crank assembly in the door and install the cable onto the rollers. Anyone who has done this knows how troublesome this can be, but I managed to get it all working the first time! That was a lucky day!

Here’s a video of some of the work I did on that window crank in the 275GTS.

The rest of the car and engine compartment looked pretty good, and didn’t look like it needed much work.

One thing I did want to replace on this car was the degrading yellow fuel hose. There was a batch of yellow fuel hose that was sold in the 80s and 90s that over time has shown to weep past the sheathing. This faulty hose is easy to spot by the goo oozing out along the sheathing of the hose. This defective hose also has a dull almost matte finish compared to the newer hose that has a shiny yellow jacket.

Something in modern fuel seems to dissolve the rubber inside this old hose and causes it to ooze out. I figure if it’s coming out from inside the hose, then this same ooze is going through the fuel and into the carburetors, so replacing this hose is probably a good thing. What’s interesting is the older hose that I’ve seen on unrestored Ferraris seem not to degrade like this faulty hose, not does the new hose currently being sold by all the usual suppliers. Whatever the case, it you see yellow fuel hose doing this weeping, it’s time to change it out!

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