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.