If you saw the video I posted this week (click on the picture), then you know I had shoulder surgery! I sometimes feel the warranty on body has expired, but I guess that’s the sign of old age. Whatever the case, I now have to face several weeks of life with my arm immobile in sling as the repair to my rotator cuff heals, followed by rehabilitation of my right arm. I injured my shoulder this past summer, but waited until February so I could get some of the pressing Ferrari work done before surgery.

Before I went in for surgery, I managed to get the timing chain case off the 400GT. It was pretty greasy, and will get cleaned up and inspected.

The water pump and oil pumps on these engines are integrated, and tricky to get out, but I managed to get it out without breaking anything. I was fortunate enough to get copies of shop manuals for this car in English, but even with instructions, it was not very clear. I took great care taking things apart knowing any broken piece on this engine would be nearly impossible to replace!

With the engine out of the car, I was able to pull the rear main cap to inspect the condition of the crank, have better access to the rear main seal, and reach two little o-rings that are hidden on the studs on the rear main cap.

After surgery, one of first jobs to keep things moving forward was to send the water pump housing from the 275GTS out for some machine work. There was a water pump leak on this car that was recently purchased, and I decided to upgrade the seal. The original seal had its faults, and Ferrari upgraded this seal with the four cam 365 engines. They replaced a steel plate that sealed the carbon seal against the impeller with a ceramic part. These parts proved to be more durable and less susceptible to corrosion and failure.

To install the newer seals, the original water pump body needed to be machined to accept the larger seal.

The larger seal with the ceramic insert is 41mm, and the original seal was about 38 mm. There was plenty of material of the older water pumps to accept this new seal, but I needed to send this out to a machinist to do the work. I have a Bridgeport at my shop, and although I’m learning how to use it, I’m still not confident enough to machine irreplaceable parts like this water pump housing if I make a mistake!

The new design of the seal kind of reverses the way the water pump seal works, but allows less wear between the rotating parts.

Once I get the parts machined, I’ll to have custom fit a sleeve on the water pump shaft, but at least my lathe skills can do that operation. I’ll do a full post about this water pump upgrade when I have all the pieces together!

Hi All, I recorded a Podcast talking about Ferraris with Christian and Doug on their show “To All the Cars I’ve Loved Before. We talked about all sorts of things, but mostly Ferraris! Check it out!

As I continued to work on the 400GT at my shop, I was left with a ton of cleaning to do from the oil leaks on this engine. Not only was the rear main seal leaking, but it was also leaking from the main bearing cap. On earlier cars, the rear bearing cap can come straight down, but on this particular car, there is a cross member that partially obstructs the bolts. Some of these leaks would be impossible to address without removing the engine.

The owner and I both did not really want to pull the engine on this car, but the reality was I would never be able to address the leaks without it. The owner left it to my discretion and despite my best efforts and hopeful thinking, I decided it would be the best course of action. After looking at the rest of the car, and finding things to be in good order, I felt it was worth the expense of fixing this car properly. Although fixing anything properly is the best way to go, cars like the 400GT can make the owner take pause when the cost of repairs can exceed half the value of the car! I tried my best to keep that in mind, but years of deferred maintenance is what brought this car to this condition, and it deserved better work.

I had my friend Matthew over to help me remove the engine, and we continued cleaning all the dirt and oil that had accumulated through the years. Not only was this a dirty mess, but the coating of dirt probably insulated the heat around this engine causing it to run hotter which could have also added to the seals deteriorating and leaking even more. A clean engine could only help.

After a first round of cleaning, I marked all the cams, and removed them so I could rotate the engine freely without the risk of bending any valves as the timing chain and the front timing chest could be removed. There is so little documentation on these engines and the only shop manuals I could find were written in Italian. Even if I translated the manuals, I could see the instructions were vague and not really helpful. These engines were first made for the 365GTC/4 and were carried through to the 365GT/4 2+2, 400GT, 400i, and eventually 412. They’re Columbo engines in spirit, but the front timing chains are specific to these engines and disassembly was pretty tricky for me. Luckily I had guidance from Francois, and several other friends of mine in the business, but I have found that so few Ferrari Mechanics have worked on these engines, that their memories are distant and perhaps fogged by a little bit of PTSD!

I used my fork lift to hold the engine while the grease and dirt was removed, but I had to build a new engine stand to make working on this engine easier. I had brought my other engine stand down to Francois’ shop to build a 330 engine for another car, but needed a second one to progress with this disassembly. I went to the local Harbor Freight and bought two engine stands to make the special configuration Ferrari engines need to work on them. Needless to say it took longer than expected, but if you’ve ever done projects like this, you would know it always takes longer than expected!

After removing the water pump and oil pump housing, I could finally remove the timing chest from the front of the engine, and it confirmed my need to take things apart to properly seal this engine. I believe the 7/12 head was removed from this engine while it was still in the car sometime in its past. The evidence of all this RTV smeared around the water passages only on this side of the engine with none on the other head was the clue.

The back side of the timing chest showed the same evidence. I went back and looked at the compression numbers to see if there were more clues to the work. Here are the numbers: #1 167, #2 155, #3 145, #4 160, #5 170, # 6 165, #7 168, #8 200, #9 165, #10 165, # 11 160, #12 120, You’ll notice cylinder number 8 on the 7/12 bank showed 200 lbs of compression when the average compression was at about 158. # 12 is a little low at 120, but not a killer for a 50 year old engine, but I’m surprised to see 200. Perhaps cylinder # 8 had a problem like a burned valve, and the head was removed to repair so the evidence of just removing the one head is evidence of the RTV. We may never know, but that’s the nature of these cars!

I do know that we did the right thing by taking this engine out of the car as I saw things that could only be repaired with an engine out. This short water pump hose that connected the water pump to the timing chest was probably original, and never been replaced. As the rubber deteriorated, small leaks formed and allowed coolant to seep out, crusting over with electrolysis between the aluminum and the failing coolant. Eventually, this hose would have failed, and leaked all the coolant out of the water pump, making engine removal a necessity, but under dire circumstances!

These round o-rings that sealed the passages between the heads and the timing chest were pretty compressed and flattened, so resealing them without replacing them would be a asking for future leaks. Sitting down with a parts book to specify the exact o-rings I would need has been a daily routine with this engine!

Scraping gasket surfaces has been the extent of the rest of my days!

Let’s not forget the inordinate amount of cleaning this engine has despite having done it several times before. There are so many areas the seem to trap dirt and oil that cleaning it was a challenge!

Here”s the video of the process.

All the work I did on the Green 330GTC last year was culminating to showing the car at Cavallino in Palm Beach at the Breakers in January. If you followed along on this car, I met the owner during last year’s show to consult on the car. Chas brought his car to Cavallino the two previous years and failed to win a Platinum. The first year, he scored 91 points, and missed the Platinum by 6 points. He requested his score sheets, and fixed the deductions the judges found and returned the following year only to get 85 points! Frustrated with the process, I was asked to look at the car and discuss why the car kept failing to win. This is a common occurrence, and often times owner get frustrated and blame the judges for inconsistencies in scoring, or politics. I explained that, although some of this may be true, it more common that when a car has so many things wrong with it, the Judges stop deducting once the car’s score drops below 85 points. In the 15 minutes a judge has to score a car for Concours Judging, it’s impossible to show everything that is wrong with the car. Therefore, correcting a car purely based on a score sheet is a bad idea. I spent about 30 minutes last year on Chas’ car and easily found 30 things wrong with the car and can be seen in this video I shot during the inspection.

The car was sent to me to correct all the problems, but there were some major issues that we decided were not worth the effort or expense to remediate. I wanted to see if we could make the car as perfect as possible and allow a certain margin of deductions for the things we were willing to lose. I guess I was being pragmatic with the showing of this car without an unlimited budget simply to win an award.

I was also asked to show a SI 330GT 2+2 that I’ve shown several times before at Cavallino. This was a multi Platinum winning car, and I was honored to show it again.

Chas and Darlene proudly parked their Ferrari amongst all the other Ferraris and four other GTCs. The Green, Pino Verde, color really stood out compared to the usual reds, silvers, and blues. I was proud of the work we did on the car, and the public seemed to agree.

When our time came to judging, Chas and I took turns showing the various details of the car and operation. I personally knew where the potential deductions were located, but was hoping the judges wouldn’t see.

Unfortunately at the end of the day we did not win an award. I won’t be sure until we get the score sheets but I have my suspicions on what might have kept us from winning a platinum. The biggest eye sore was the way the driver’s side door closed on this car. No matter the adjustments I made, I could not get the door to close tighter to the body of the car. This kind of door fit should have been addressed before the car was painted, but it was over looked many years ago during a repaint. This was one of the items that I knew was going to hurt us in judging, but I tried my best to correct all the other issues. If I had missed one too many other items, I felt this could hurt us in the end. This may be what happened.

I was pretty disappointed with the result, but it didn’t take long for Chas to tell me he wanted to come back and try again. We will wait for score sheets, and see what the judges found. Hopefully, they are legitimate deductions and we’ll try to figure out what to do with the door. We’re going to try our best to fix the door without repainting the car. I feel there is a limit to the expenses and effort to attain a Platinum, and the owner agrees.

Here’s a video of the day at Cavallino and post show recap.

I was back at Francois’ shop to continue assembling the 330 engine we’re rebuilding together. I installed the oil pump and fuel pump drive mechanism and turned my attention to installing the timing chain.

There’s a sprocket inside the timing chest than needs to be installed with a fixed axle, but I was having trouble getting everything lined up.

The shaft goes through the hole at the center of the timing chest, but needs to align with the sprocket, bearings, and two washers before seating on the other side of the timing chest.

Francois machined a guide pin to align everything up so fitting the axle would be easier.

It was time to prep the head gaskets for installation. I have had a lot of history and experience with failed head gaskets, and I still get an e-mail from someone about every 6 months from around the world about a head gasket failure. These failures happen even before the engine is started and involves coolant leaking between the head and the block. The head gasket pictured above (I won’t name names), is the one I have had failures with, and whenever I get an email, the description I get from the shop describes these gaskets exactly. The coolant leaks occur at the water passages that you see at the bottom row and top row of the block where this gasket material is not compressing enough to seal the water passages. The silicone bead that is printed on this gasket doesn’t seem to help in the sealing either. Another problem is these engines are aluminum, with a steel cylinder liner that is machined to sit a couple thousandths higher than the deck of the block. The reason for this is as the engine heats up, the aluminum block expands a little more than the steel liner, so this difference in height allows the parts to stay sealed as the engine heat cycles. The problem is if the fiber material in the head gasket is too hard, it won’t compress enough to seal the difference when things are cold!

My solution is to use this gasket pictured above. It’s manufactured by Murray Glegg in Australia. We’ve known about his issue for many years, and Murray took on the task of designing and manufacturing a gasket that doesn’t have these sealing problems. As you can see, each water passage is completely surrounded by a silicone ring, top and bottom, and the fiber material is softer than the other brand. I’ve been using Fiorano Spares’ gasket for years and have not had a failure. Although the usual suppliers carry other brands and claim they don’t have problems, it’s very hard to trust what they say if I’m still getting the occasional e-mail from someone still having problems! I’m not saying the other gaskets will always fail, but even one failure is not acceptable. There are a lot of hours that goes into assembling an engine before one realizes the gasket has failed, so it’s not worth the risk! Murray makes gaskets for many Vintage and modern Ferraris, so it might be worth a call before you take a chance on an inferior gasket!

Here’s some of Murray’s contact information in Australia. His e-mail is murray@gleggman.com

I removed the carburetors to start taking the cam covers off the 400GT. You can see from the staining on the exhaust shields this engine has been leaking a lot of oil through the years!

The 400GT integrates the intake rubbers with the cam covers, and these could use fresh coat of wrinkle paint.

The owner and I decided now was the time to clean things up and bring this engine back to its former glory. I’m not going to make a show car out of it, but we’ll clean things up a little bit to make it look better.

Before stripping the cam covers of paint, I needed to remove the little rubber hoses that were part of a crank case ventilation system on this car.

The looked like the original hoses and may never have been replaced, and several of them cracked in half under the braided cloth cover. These were definitely part of my tuning issues when I had the carburetors cleaned. Although I had the car running OK, I couldn’t get it perfect, and this was the reason. These old broken hoses were causing vacuum leaks down stream of the carburetors making the car run lean. Changing the idle mixture screws didn’t seem to affect the tune much because so much extra air was being erratically sucked in. I’m looking forward to see how well the carb tuning will go go when I replace all these leaky hoses!

I had to remove the throttle levers so I could paint these cam covers, but they were a little more finicky than the earlier cars where the throttle stands were bolted to the cam covers. Ferrari decided to cast the throttle stands on the 400GTs, so they had to all come apart. Pressing all these levers out was a test of patience, ingenuity, and a search around my shop for something to fit my press. If you’re done this, you’ll understand!

I’ll send these acorn nuts out for new plating. It’s not a show car, but these will go a long way towards making the engine bay look nice next to the fresh wrinkle paint!

Getting the old wrinkle paint was going to be a challenge even though some of it was flaking off. The new paint stripper that is supposed to be safer for our health seems to have taken all effective paint stripping chemicals out of the formula!

It’s going to take several attempts to get all the paint off! So much for a kindler gentler stripper!

The next issue is what to do about the oil leaks. with the cam covers off, I found several cam seals cut and deformed, held in place with gobs of silicone sealer. Unfortunately, this stuff doesn’t work when the cam seals are cut, because oil will eventually find a way past the rtv. Inserting new seals is not easy, and it’s starting to look like I may have to pull the engine to properly seal this engine. I really wanted to avoid this procedure, hoping by chance the cam seals were intact, but here’s the evidence they were cut, broken, and not sealing any more.

I stripped the interior out of the black GTE to prepare for the floor pan replacement.

All the old insulation and padding that could be flammable was removed because there was going to be a lot of cutting welding and flying sparks when the floors are being repaired.

I removed the pedal box assembly as well so I could rebuild it.

It probably has never been out of the car, but could use a good cleaning and inspection.

These pedal boxes were overbuilt by Ferrari, and rarely wear any of the internal parts. The bearings only needed a good cleaning and repacking with fresh grease.

I needed to rebuild the pedal box so Mark at the Panel Shop could reinstall it in the car and use it to properly align the frame rail to support it. The original frame member was pretty rusty and the previous repair didn’t help, so we’ll be using the pedal box to get all the frames and bracketry to line up properly.

The next job was to remove the fuel tank. Since the fuel lines were getting disconnected, we felt to would be safer to remove the whole fuel system with the amount of welding we were going to do do under this car.

I could tell from the red colored washer material insulating the fuel tank mounts that this fuel tank had probably never been removed from this car its whole life.

Heavy undercoating was sprayed under the car, so getting these fasteners removed was a little challenging!

With the fuel tank out of the car, this GTE was ready to ship out to The Panel Shop for the floor pan work. It’ll be back in several months for the next step in getting this car safe and road worthy.

I took the hood off the 330 to re-glue the hood pad and install the hood stays. It’s a lot easier to work on the hood with it on a workbench!

Fitting the freshly chromed bumpers always need a little work on the details before mounting them on the car like chasing all the threads on the mounting studs.

The same goes for the grille. Making sure the pieces all fit together, installing a new rubber gasket, and mounting the horse in the grille all need to be done before fitting it to the car.

I was waiting for some yellow fuel lines to arrive in the mail for this 275GTS I have at my shop, when I saw a small drip of coolant on the floor under the car.

When I inspected this car a several weeks ago, I marveled at how dry it was under the car, and I think I jinxed myself! I followed a trail of coolant on the front of the engine back to the weep hole at the bottom of the water pump!

Sometimes if you ignore this little drip, the water pump could go for years without having to replace the seal, but it depends. I have found these issues rarely go away, and now was the time to fix it.

The water pump on a Colombo V-12 takes some work to access, and requires removing the hood, then the radiator, then the associated hoses. It sounds like a lot of work, but it’s a lot easier to start the job knowing these parts come out, than to figure it out along with way!

I started to remove the water pump body to check how hard it would be to slide out before unbolting the main crank pulley. Once the water pump started to release, I went ahead and pulled he lower pulley so the water pump housing could be removed.

When I first took the impeller off the water pump, the carbon seal fell to the floor. Normally, this carbon ring that presses against the back of the impeller is securely sealed against the rubber water pump seal assembly.

I found this fit was loose, and probably leaking water from this area. There’s an internal spring that presses this assembly against the back of the impeller to create a seal, but this was no longer working.

We have found sometimes the spring pressure is not sufficient to make a good seal, and have had to shim the back side of this seal to push the water pump seal a little harder against the impeller. I will have to take a look at the replacement seal when it arrives in the mail to see how well attached the carbon ring is secured to the rubber seal as well!

With the radiator out of the car, decided to remove the cavallino mounted to the grille and send it out for replating. The rest of the car had fresh paint and good chrome, but the horse could use a little freshening up. Access the nuts that secured the cavallino to the grille was much easier from behind without having to remove the whole grille!

Thanks everyone for contributing to the Annual Fund Drive. I can’t tell you how much it means to me to have your support and appreciation for the time and energy it takes to collect, edit, and present all the Ferrari Content I interact with through the year to share on the Internet. I love what I do with Vintage Ferraris, and get excited to share them with you here and on all the other platforms and am happy you all like it too! Here’s to a good 2024 and an even better 2025!