I had a few things left to sort out on this Ferrari 275GTS I have at my shop before sending it to the owner.

I had a new parking brake boot made to replace the old one that was torn.

The fuel filler is located in the trunk of this car and has a seal around the filler compartment, and even though it has a small vent at the top of the cap, I wanted to make sure all the other sources of vapor are not causing the smell of fuel to enter the trunk area.

Often times the rubber gasket at the fuel filler cap is brittle and crumbling, and the cap on the GTS was no exception. Not only was this gasket 60 years old, but has been exposed to all sorts of fuel formulations that break down the rubber.

The cap is silver soldered together, so taking it apart is not a good idea, but I have found I can remove the old gasket by cutting, chipping, and breaking it apart. Once the old gasket it removed, I cut a new one, with a slightly smaller ID to slide under the center of the cap, capturing it in place.

I use fuel safe cork gasket material which should stand up to anything found in modern fuels without dissolving.

While I was looking at the fuel filler neck, I found the wrong clamps holding the filler neck hose in place. It wasn’t even a matter of concours correctness, but these little strap hoses may not provide the clamping force needed to hold the hose in place. The correct hose clamp would have a been a “Cheny” type hose clamp, but since this area was hidden behind a panel, there was no reason not to use a wider worm screw type hose clamp to insure no leaks.

The next step was to change the oil. I was alarmed when I saw this green stuff coming out of the oil pan when all the oil drained.

I took the lower pan off the car to investigate further, and found the green stuff was engine paint that was peeling off the inside of the oil pan! I’ve never seen this green stuff, but have seen dark red coatings like gliptol. As you can see, some of the paint was peeling off in sheets, while most of it was stuck pretty well and was not coming off even with vigorous scrubbing.

There was a collection of chips near where the oil pick up was, so this amount was probably blocking the screen before I had drained the oil out of the sump.

The question is what to do? Here are my thoughts: To remove all the paint would require removing the engine, because the upper pan does not come off without the engine out of the car. I did not see oil pressure fluctuations when I drove the car, so the screen was not completely obstructed by this debris. If smaller paint chips make it past the oil pick up screen, they should be caught by the oil filters, provided they don’t clog the filters! I looked at the history of this car and it looks like the engine was rebuilt in the 80s! Looking at the amount of flaking, it’s hard to tell how long this has been happening. The safest thing would be to pull the engine and take the paint off, but I don’t know how bad or how fast this chipping is happening, and don’t want to send this newly purchased car into a engine out service. Speaking to the owner we decided to watch how this progresses after the next oil change. If more debris if found in the sump, we may have to do the inevitable, if non shows up, we’ll know the rate of paint failure. We’ll see.