Work continued on the 1951 Ferrari 212 I have at my shop. The owner and I are working on getting some of the details right, and deciding which way to pursue them.

There were some dents on the top of the radiator that the owner wanted to see if we could remove. It’s one of the first things you see when opening the hood. Ironically, most later Ferraris have a hood that opens forward, but on this particular car, the hood opens conventionally with the hinges at the cowl, so these dents are more obvious.

I had a Paintless Dent Removal guy come to the shop and take a look to see what he could do. He accessed the area through the filler neck of the radiator and was able to remove most of the dents. Unfortunately, some of the paint cracked on the radiator which was to be expected as paint on these surfaces are often not as well adhered.

After the PDR guy left, I masked and prepped the radiator for painting, planning to blend the paint as best as I could. Removing the radiator was an option, but due to the time constraints, I decided not to go there!

Other little details needed to be addressed if I were to make this 212 into a Platinum Show car, and one of them was the safety wire on the steering column. I’ve been dinged before for using stainless steel wire to secure the bolts on the steering shaft. Ferrari used black oxide mechanic’s wire to secure these bolts, and I changed this out. Some of you are probably rolling your eyes at this, but that’s the level we’re playing at with Platinum show cars!

This 212 has two mechanical fuel pumps feeding the engine while it’s running. I noticed it wouldn’t stay running when relying on the mechanical pumps, so I had to take a closer look.

One of the diaphragms was rock hard, and not moving fuel too well. These older diaphragms have a slot in the shaft that attaches to the fulcrum differently than the later designs I’m used to, but I figured out how to disassemble and reassemble the unit in short order.

The check valves were working fine once I replaced the seals, so the pumps were back doing their thing!

I had a 365GT 2+2 come into my shop for her annual service. It’s a car that I’ve had at my. shop several times before and even on some house calls whenever it only needed an oil change.

Here’s the YouTube video of the test drive after the valve adjustment and initial tune.

As I was reassembling the engine after the valve adjustment, I noticed the oil seal behind one of the pulleys was hard as rock, so now was the time to replace it. Everything stopped as I waited for this seal to arrive, but that’s the nature of working on old Ferraris!

As the ignition wires were being installed, I found a couple plug ends were cracked and the wires were pretty brittle. I have never changed these wires since I started taking care of this car, so who knows how old they were. These red wires are usually spiral wound wires to suppress EM interference in the electronic ignition boxes and radios, but are not as durable as the solid wires they replaced.

Late 365GT 2+2s changed their ignition systems from conventional points systems to an early capacitor discharge ignition box requiring these wires, but the ones available in the Ferrari market are usually made for the later cars, so they’re not exactly right.

I trimmed the new set to follow the original details of the old wires and reused some of the wire keepers to keep it looking original.

With the new wires installed the car was firing on all cylinders!

It was also time to change out the air filters as I don’t have any records of changing these out either! They were pretty dirty, and it was time.

Air filters can sometimes be tricky for Vintage Ferraris. The height, circumference, and size can change from the size of the housing, the type of carburetor, or the model of the car. Some Ferrari models kept the same air filter throughout the model run, while others changed mid model and made no changes in the catalog. The only way to be sure is to measure the filters and see if the new ones match. It would be easy to go down to my local auto parts store to buy filters, but they will inevitably ask for a year, make, and model, and soon discover the don’t have any parts in their system. If I know the parts store people they may let me go through their inventory looking for a filter that would fit, but that can be time consuming if we have no clue which boxes to start opening! I could spend an hour looking and turn up nothing.

I called my usual Ferrari parts supplier and they had two sizes available for a 365GT 2+2, and they were nice enough to go down to the warehouse and measure the two sizes to see which ones would fit. One of them seemed like the right one, and I had them send three of them to me. It would seem like an easy solution, but the heart ache was three filters cost about $600 dollars! I’m not sure what’s worse, paying me to look a little more for off the shelf filters at my local auto parts store, or simply pay the “Ferrari Tax!”

As work progressed on the interior of the blue 330GT we needed to fix some issues with the fiberglass center console panel. I don’t know anyone that likes to work with fiberglass unless you have a business set up for this kind of work. It’s not particularly hard, but it’s messy, smelly, and often makes you itch for at least a day if you’re not wearing proper PPE. My upholsterer was not volunteering to fix the piece, and I had the materials at my shop to do the work, so I here I am!

The old fiberglass had cracked and the openings to the electric window switches needed reinforcing.

While I was fixing the major holes and cracks, I resolved the cigarette lighter hole to more roundness, and reinforced some more cracks.

Some areas were thin and flexed with any pressure, and there were some bubbles in the original gel coat, so I filled and reinforced these areas with fiberglass fibers and gel.

I sanded everything smooth and took it back to the upholsterer for a leather cover.

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.

I had a set of headers I wanted to send out for high temp ceramic coating. It’s a process that I highly recommend as I coated the exhaust headers on my 330 America over 25 years ago, and they still look like they were done yesterday. Years ago, the only place that offered this service was Jet-Hot, and I had to package the headers, ship them out, and wait for their return. Today, there are shops that offer this process locally, and I have one within a reasonable drive away. Although shipping parts is a normal occurrence in any business, I always prefer hand delivering parts to insure they don’t get lost or damaged when shipped. Some of these parts are irreplaceable, and a little effort on my part can save some future heartache!

Before I could take these headers out for shipping, I had to fix a stripped bolt that used to secure the exhaust shield that covers the header. It looks like someone tried to fix this sheared bolt by attempting to drill it out, but the drill bit walked off the top of the bolt. Luckily, they stopped before making more damage, but left the repair for me to fix!

The attempted repair failed probably because they were using a hand drill, and it is nearly impossible to drill down the center of a sheared bolt without some help. I had a lot better chance succeeding with the header off the car, and a welder to add more material to drill. There were two ways to fix this problem, one was to try and extract the original bolt, or two, weld and cut a new hole and tap new threads. I decided to pick option two since this bolt was not critical in it’s purpose and just needed a decent hole with threads to work.

After grinding away the weld flush with the surface of the hole, I had a nice flat area to center punch a new hole. If I got it in the same position as the original hole, great, but it wasn’t necessary for all this to work.

The next decision was where was I going to mount this header to drill my hole? My Bridgeport would have been the sexiest way to drill an accurate hole, but fixuring it to the bed may have taken longer than mounting it to my drill press. I found my drill press vice was just large enough to hold the header firmly in place, and small enough to allow clearance for the pipes to hang below the table.

I made quick work of drilling a new hole and tapping new M6x1.0 threads in the stanchion. Next, the header goes out for ceramic coating!

I went to south Florida in February this year to attend Cavallino and try to win an elusive Platinum Award for this green Ferrari 330 GTC. You may remember this car from the last couple of years meeting the owner, inspecting the car, agreeing to prepare the car for Cavallino, and showing it last year. We missed the mark by a thin margin, spent the last year correcting the final faults, and this year tried one last time to get it across the line!

Cavallino, which was held at the Breakers in Palm Beach Florida for over 30 years moved to a new venue, The Boca Raton, an hour drive down the intercoastal waterway along the Atlantic. The Breakers was renovating and Canossa, the owner of Cavallino signed a three year contract with The Boca Raton, a private resort and golf course.

As with any new venue, there was a lot of teething pains. I tried my best to be patient and understanding the volunteers were as much in the dark on the new layout as I was, but hopefully they will get better with years to come.

There were 6 330 GTCs in our class, which was the largest single model collection of Vintage Ferraris than any other class. Even though cars are judged individually, having such good examples in a row made showing the green 330 that much harder. I believe the strong turn out belongs largely to Clete Gardenhour, a judge and owner of a GTC. Many years ago, Clete showed his personal GTC at a Ferrari show and won and award, but continued to correct the details on his car. The following year, he returned to receive a lower score and no award at all. His disgust was and is a common occurrence in showing a car at a Concours, but instead of simply complaining, Clete took it upon himself to create a concours guide specifically for Ferrari 330GTCs, and make it available to everyone. He tirelessly collected information, and confirmed the details with many restorers, owners, and historians. I was honored to be included as one of his resources, but this guide would not have been made without Clete’s dedication.

Other people have created guides for other models, but they are not nearly as thoroughly researched, updated, and referenced as Clete’s guide, so when I got the ribbon designating a win at Cavallino, not only did I have a long list of people to thank, I know it also came from a lot of hard work from the judges, restorers, and volunteers that put this show together.

Chas, the owner of this car couldn’t attend Cavallino this year due to the later date of the event over Valentine’s Day Weekend, but I did my best to show the car in his stead. I was so happy for the owner to have brought this car across the Platinum line. We started this journey with a nice car, but not up to Platinum Standards. I knew there were some every expensive repairs needed to make this car perfect, but I wanted to take a pragmatic approach towards winning. I took on the challenge collecting all the necessary points that we could correct, with an eye for the most return in points over cost. Platinum show judging has gotten so competitive, that often times only ground up restorations are the only way to win a Platinum, but I wanted to prove we could do it without that expense.

Our hard work and commitment paid off, and now Chas has a nice car and a Platinum award to be proud of. Thanks Everyone!

You can watch the Cavallino Experience in this YouTube video, and the story about the car that didn’t make the mark!

An interesting car arrived at my shop on a cold January morning. There was 20 inches of snow on the ground and the temps were hovering around 20 degrees.

The car was a 1951 Ferrari 212 that was once owned by David Letterman. This car seems to have gone full circle because I’ve known about this car for over 30 years. I had started working for Late Show with David Letterman in 1993 as an Audio Engineer, and Francois had started working for Letterman on his Ferraris a few years earlier. As fate would have it, we met each other through Ferraris and our connection has grown into a friendship and career that lasted well beyond our former employer!

Back in the mid 90s, Letterman was asked to show his Ferrari 212 in NYC for a show that was held in Midtown Manhattan at Rockefeller Center, and I tagged along to the show. When we were asked to drive the car across the reviewing stand, I jumped in the back seat for a ride!

The car was finished by Francois after bringing it back from the West Coast. Letterman bought the car to restore, and the restoration out in California was dragging on. Francois advised him to bring the car to his shop in Connecticut to assemble the engine and finish the car. As Dave and Francois bought more Ferraris, and this car was finished, Dave realized he preferred the “newer” Ferraris he added to his collection, from a Daytona, Boxer, and a Lusso. This car languished in Dave’s collection and eventually was sold to Dana Mecum.

The current owner bought the car at auction this year, after researching the car, and discussing the history of the car with me. He liked the story, and decided to bid on the car. These early Ferraris were built in the company’s infancy with the Factory only open for a few years. Ferrari was using several body builders in Italy to design and shape the bodies on their chassis and engine combination, and this particular was was built by Ghia. Some felt the shape of this particular cars was not as sexy as some of the designs of other car built by Touring, Vignale, or Pininfariana, but the lines of this car definitely speak the vernacular of the 50s.

This car has been bouncing around the auction circuit for the past 3 years, moving on and off trucks, started, run for a short time, and parked, so I had to make a list of things that needed to be addressed to make this car road worthy again. I found an exhaust pipe that had cracked at the weld that needed attention.

There was some weeping at the fuel tank that I will have to investigate. Hopefully it’s a loose fitting or breather hose instead of a crack in the tank!

I also saw some fluid leaking from one of the rear brake drums.

Removing the drum, I found red gear oil leaking down from the axle seal. From the trails of dirt, I could see this slow leak was happening for a while.

The drums were surprisingly clean with only a light coating of oil.

The brake shoes will have to be cleaned, but first I wanted to remove the hub to get to the source of the leak.

I will get a new seal and install it, but I also plan to change out the rear differential oil. I spoke to Francois about the service on the rear axle, and he told me this was done while the car was in California. The oil looked fine, but I felt was too thin and improper for a Ferrari rear axle. Ferraris specify a very thick rear axle oil, and the oil installed in this axle seemed like synthetic gear oil with very low viscosity. Thicker oil and a new seal should remedy this leak.

I drained the engine oil and found the usual signs of no mileage and short time running with it being pretty dark. Hopefully with new fluids and a thorough service, this car will see more mileage in the next year than it did in the 30 years Letterman owned it!

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!