I had my friend Matthew come over to help me install the engine to the Ferrari 400GT after I sealed up all the oil leaks. I wanted to test out a theory that Ferrari installed these four cam engines with the side draft carburetors all installed. I also believed the air filter assemblies were attached to the engines as well, but I wanted to test my carb hypothesis first.

The massive engine had to go into the car at an angle to clear the firewall if I were to keep the distributors on the car, but that caused the rear most carburetor to hit against the driver’s side pedal box. It soon became obvious that Ferrari was not as creative at saving time during the assembly of these cars, but worked just as long and suffered just as much us mechanics when it cam to putting these cars together!

Only one of the two rear carburetors had to come out to install the engine, but there was still a lot of bolts, fasteners and hoses to hook up once the engine was in place.

It’s a pretty impressive engine when it’s all installed, but so labor intensive!

At the rear of the engine, I was not going to install the transmission until I made absolutely sure the distributors were timed in correctly, and there were no leaks. Without the transmission installed, this was the best access I would ever have to the distributors. Once the transmission is in place, the only way to get the distributors out is though limited access from the behind the firewall.

A customer went to release the trunk lever in his Dino and the lever snapped off in his hand. It looks like the plastic plate holding the levers was not doing too well either, but luckily replacement parts are available.

The customer ordered the parts from one of the usual suspects that supply Dino parts, and the lever was a nice reproduction. The backing plate was made from machined aluminum and looked to be black anodized instead of the original plastic that gets brittle and fragile through the years.

They also sell new cables, but installing them would have involved removing the fuel tank. Luckily, the cables on this car were in great shape, so I was going to try an easier method to replace this panel.

At first glance it seemed like a nice piece, but if I were to be critical, the machining marks could be seen through the anodizing and in the right light is very obvious. If I were building a show car, I would actually consider sending this part out for powder coating for a smoother finish, but realized the extra paint may affect the clearance of the levers in the slots. It’s a shame so much time and money was spent reverse engineering this part from scanning, digitizing, machining, anodizing, only to come up short with the final look of the part. If I had the digital file, I would widen the slots a few thousandths and powder coat the part instead of anodize, but what do I know?!

After the owner got the new parts delivered, he realized the replacement was not so simple and sent the car to me! The plastic panel was secured to the rear panel with two screws, but there was not enough slack in the cable to pull the lever assembly away from the rear panel to access the cable attachments. The fuel tank obstructs access to the rear of this panel, so there had to be another way!

The braided cable that attaches to the various lids and levers ran through tubes that were welded to the undersides of the fenders, so I disconnected the cables that pulled on the trunk, the engine lid, and gas cap at their respective latches. I was careful not pull the cables out too far into the tubes as getting them to push back out might be problematic. The last thing I wanted to do was to have to pull the gas tank for access to the cables!

With the engine lid cables, it was easier to disconnect the whole latch assembly to give a few inches of slack instead of disconnecting the cable.

The cables are attached to the back of the levers with pins and tiny e-clips. I left the cables hanging and disassembled the rest of the lever assembly out of the car.

The pivot rod has to be punched out being careful not to lose the tension springs on each lever as they clear the pivot rod.

Installation was the reverse of removal!

With heads removed from the 330 engine at my shop it was time to get the timing chain assembly off and continue taking everything apart.

The oil pressure regulator, filter housing and water pump assembly was removed.

Two studs that passed through the timing chest that were attached to the block were giving my grief and not allowing the timing chest to come off. I had to go very slowly to get it to move, starting out with just a small fraction of an inch. I used a combination of heat, penetration oil and a stud remover to break loose the corrosion that was locking the aluminum to the steel stud.

Looking carefully at the front of the timing chest revealed the two studs that went all the way through the timing chest, holding everything in place. These could have easily been missed with the other four studs that didn’t go all the way through.

Once I had the timing chest off, I was able to remove the oil pump assembly and eventually remove the pistons and crankshaft. There was some wear on the crankshaft main bearings, but nothing too catastrophic.

Two bearing showed wear like this, but the others seemed fine.

The billet steel Ferrari crank show some slight marks that I hope will polish out and keep the main bearings at a standard bore, but I’ll know more once my machinist measures everything to check.

The next stop is to gather all the parts that will need inspection and machining for this rebuild!

Here’s the accompanying video for the disassembly!

I have a customer with a Ferrari that also owns a 289 Shelby Cobra. He asked if I could take a look at it for him since he recently bought it and needed a “going over.” I tell people that I like to work only on Vintage Ferraris up to around 1972 because later cars have fuel injection and start getting into mechanics that I don’t prefer to do. I will, however make exceptions, and here was one of them.

I have always been a fan of the 289 V-8 version of the Shelby Cobra, especially the Ford small block V-8. I have a similar drivetrain in my ’65 Mustang Fastback, so Fords have been in my life since High School.

The work on this Cobra isn’t necessarily hard, but I could understand my customer’s hesitation in sending his 7 figure car anywhere. It’s not just the responsibility of keeping an expensive car at my shop, but also the network of people I use around these cars. My transporter that picked up the car knew the people of the storage facility that stored the car. They move high dollar cars all the time, and delivered the car without any drama. Sometimes using a “car club” like AAA, or a road side service tow company as part of your insurance plan will send a truck or driver not familiar with moving a Cobra, and may damage the car. I took on the job to make my customer’s worry out of the service.

The plan was to do a simple fluid change on the car and to see if there was anything else that needed addressing. The first problem I found was a nearly empty clutch master cylinder. Luckily, the clutch was still working, but we were probably days away from a complete failure.

What fluid was left was black and degraded, with crusty residue all around the reservoir. The leak was attributed to a bad seal at the master cylinder, so I ordered the parts for the repair.

The car was restored by a shop in the mid-west and done to very high level. Everything was new and cleaning refurbished, with only small leaks from disuse.

I removed the oil filter to change the oil, but found something strange near the oil pan that was not normal for a V-8. There seemed to be some kind of hose trapped between the oil pan and the block, so I traced it back to where it was coming from on the top of the engine.

I found the hose originated from the expansion tank of the cooling system, and hose was the outlet of the overflow tube! This tube was not supposed to drain into the oil pan, and was obviously a mistake. Luckily this was a relatively soft tube and must have inadvertently been trapped between the oil pan and the engine block when the oil pan was installed. The previous shop used silicone sealant to install the oil pan, so it not only did a good job at sealing the oil pan, but also this over flow tube!

Shops make mistakes, and it happens to all of us, but I spent some time considering what happened. The oil pan must have been installed with the engine already installed in the car, as I wouldn’t think the expansion tank was attached to the engine when it was inserted into the car. Perhaps there was a problem after the engine was installed that warranted the oil pan to be removed and reinstalled. With limited visual access the second time the oil pan was installed, they trapped the overflow hose between the block and the pan, glued everything in place and moved on. No damage would have occurred because the hose was pinched and couldn’t flow into the oil pan, but what’s interesting was no fluid would have been allowed to exit the over flow hose either, meaning this car had never been brought up to any significant temperature. If this car were driven normally, it would have expanded the coolant, and eventually burped out of the expansion tank. With no where for the expansion to go, it would have blown the hose off the end attached to the expansion tank and sprayed coolant all over the engine compartment. This would have caused further investigation which would have led to the pinched hose. This car was an auction car, and I wonder if there was a rush to complete this car in time for the sale. Whatever the case, we caught the problem before it got any worse!

Here’s a video of the car and a drive!

The final assembly of the SII 330 engine I am restoring was completed at Francois’ shop.

This included installing the timing chain chest. I used an anaerobic sealant on the surfaces on the block to keep oil from leaking out of this area.

With the timing chest installed, I installed the chain and timing sprockets, water pump housing, and associated seals and gaskets. This timing chest has a special bolt that secures the top of the chest to the block that I made sure I installed behind this threaded hole.

I timed in the camshafts after setting the valve lash on the heads before installing the valve covers.

I loaded up the engine and brought it back to my shop in Hudson NY to finish up the detail work. I’m glad I did most of the work at my mentor’s shop in CT, but it was time to take it back to my shop and finish some of the detail work. I posted a video of some of the work I did while I was down at Francois Sicard’s shop.

The small details included making up new spark plug wires and installing them in the spark plug tubes that are so iconic to a Vintage Ferrari engine. Some people say the boots are supposed to be black and sometimes you see the hard Bakelite resistor ends, but I have seen original cars with this orange rubber boots, so I like installing them.

Here’s a picture of some original boots as proof!

This engine is getting close to going back in the car!

There are so many little details that need to be addressed before assembling an engine like this 400GT I’m sealing from oil leaks. I painted the cam covers with fresh wrinkle paint, but found the throttle shaft bearings were a little crunchy, so I pressed them out before painting. Of course I then had to carefully mask the holes before painting.

Pressing them out required my 20 ton press and a couple of fixtures to support the cam cover and get direct pressure on the bearing. Older cars had removable throttle shaft stands, but Ferrari decided to save a step by casting these stands into the cam cover, so it was more work to remove and reinstall these bearings without breaking off these stands.

Reinstalling them needed a more delicate approach to avoid damaging the fresh wrinkle paint, so I came up with this rig with washers cut to size that would press against the bearing.

Six bearings later, all the throttle shaft stands were ready to get the rest of the linkages installed.

Removing all the masking of the other cam cover was next so I could install the carb spacers, o-rings, and dozens of vacuum hoses and clamps!

Hi All,

You may have noticed the website and forum has been slow or completely down in the last few weeks and days. I’ve been working on finding the issue and trying to keep things online. It looks like it was a bot that had found the website, and was accessing the site excessively that my web host shut down the site to control the traffic to their network. In layman’s terms, there are programs on the internet that access websites to map the information. These programs are called Bots, and search engines like Google or Bing, and other resources send these bots out to gather information and map the internet. Some can do it hundreds of times a minute and access all the websites on the Interent. Occasionally something can go wrong and a bot can access a website excessively. We think that’s what happened to my site, causing my server to temporarily shut my website down. We tried to install a script on my website to limit that particular bot from overloading the website, but we’ll see if it helps and happens again. What’s interesting in our research on who and what is accessing the website, we found Google has been downloading all the thousands of Ferrari images I have this website. I think this is part of the training these search engines are feeding their AI programs. I’m not sure how I feel about this, but there is nothing I think I can do about this if I keep this website open to the public.

Even though the traffic to this website has fallen through the years and migrated to Facebook, Youtube and other social media platforms, I still feel it is essential to keep this resource alive and accessible by the internet. Whether the data gets mined by bots or AI, it is still important to have a direct source to this rare information that we all gathered over the past 25 years. Even if AI plans of repackaging it and calling it it’s own, people will still be able to find a direct human source for this information.

I want to thanks everyone for their patience and their support through the years of this website, and understand I will try my best to keep this resource alive for as long as I possibly can!

Tom Yang

The owner of the silver SI 330GT told me he was losing brake fluid, so when I found a puddle of brake fluid below the left rear wheel, I at least had a place to start looking for a leak. I found some pretty crusty brake caliper pistons, and this one looked like it had seized and jammed.

Upon removing the piston, I found a gummed up mess. These brakes have not seen regular brake bleeds, and water had gotten into the system causing the fluid to fail and rust out the calipers. My concerns were if this was happening on this piston, the others were going to look the same.

After removing the old fluid and gunk, it wasn’t looking like these pistons were simply going to need new seals.

Bead blasting got the piston looking pretty good on the outside.

The insides, however, showed how the water had rusted and pitted the cast iron bores of the bores.

After I spoke to the owner, we decided to take all the brake calipers apart to see what else was wrong. The front calipers weren’t in any better shape, but these calipers had been previously sleeved in brass. I prefer sleeving these calipers in stainless steel, but brass sleeves are another option. I had my calipers sleeved in brass over 20 years ago, and they’re holding up fine, but I have found stainless more durable, When pistons don’t see regular fluid changes, brass can show corrosion, and form ridges that then need to sanded smooth changing the bore dimensions.

The front calipers cleaned up fine, and I was able to install new seal kits, but the rear pistons were sent out to my brake rebuilder for new stainless steel sleeves.

When I was taking the interior out of the 330GT so I could remove the transmission, I found broken mount on the passenger seat. These mounts secure the seat tracks to the car, and have four capture nuts for each corner of the seat. These nuts tend to seize and then start to turn freely in their cages. It looks like this happened with a previous shop, and they cut the seat mount apart to release the seized nut, but did nothing to replace the capture nut. What’s worse, is they secured the seat to this half cut seat mount with a washer and a nut. With any sort of force, this seat would have come loose, so not only was this sloppy work, but dangerous and irresponsible!

There was all sorts of damage made to this area to try first stop the old capture nut from spinning, and finally to cut the assembly out, but I wanted to fix the damage, and make this seat mount safe and secure.

I bought a weld in capture nut assembly from McMaster Carr and the plan was to plug weld the cage to the bottom of the seat mount so all the upward force of the seat bolts would be on the seat rail and not just the capture nut. The welds would simply be holding the cage from spinning when unbolting the seat. I’ll use anti-seize on the bolts to stop the bolt from seizing.

I rebuilt the missing parts of the seat mount and welded the parts to the capture nut assembly on the other side as well. Once I fixed the seat mount, I made a patch to repair the cuts made to the rest of the seat mount area.

I ground down the welds and got everything to the original level of the steel so the seat tracks will slide smoothly over this mounting area. I’ll paint this area, and eventually this area will be covered with carpeting so no one will see this repair, but the owner and I will know his seats are securely fastened to his Ferrari!

I posted the video of the engine removal and extent of the damage on YouTube, but I’ll go over some of the specific details here on this blog.

This engine was filthy with oil and dirt collecting on the outside surfaces for years, so the first thing was to get it power washed. I have an old fork lift at my shop that really comes in handy for jobs like this.

Since my driveway outside the shop is gravel, I can’t get my engine hoist’s wheels outside to set it by the power washer, but the fork lift can reach outside of the shop door just far enough so I don’t spray all this dirt back into my shop.

A clean(er) engine is much easier to work on and makes less of a mess in the shop!

Unfortunately, both my engine stands are occupied, so I had to start some of the disassembly on the ground. Hopefully in the next few weeks, I’ll be making progress on the other two engines so I can free up an engine stand, but for now, I’ll be taking ibuprofen in the evenings!

When I took the engine out of the car, I found one of the motor mounts had a cracked weld. Instead of putting this on the shelf, I went ahead and fixed the broken engine mount so I would save myself the trouble of doing it later. Trust me, my weld isn’t the sloppy part of this engine mount. The original weld is from the factory. It’s no wonder why it broke!

Not only was this engine leaking oil, but years of leaking gaskets also rusted some of the studs holding the accessories like the thermostat housing. The arrow shows the rusty stud that was fusing the housing to the engine block. I used penetrating oil, heat, and steady force to finally get this housing off. It probably took over an hour to remove this one part!

The water pump housing was no easier. What happens is through the years, the gasket weeps a little coolant, and it gets drawn up into the steel stud. The dissimilar metals causes the steel stud to corrode with the aluminum housing forming a powder that locks the parts together. It take patience, penetrating oil, heat, and careful force to get these parts apart. These parts are not available, so breaking them is not an option!

When I finally got the water pump off, I could see there were only two rusty studs that were causing most of the problem, but I managed to get the water pump off, and move onto the next issue.

When I took the valve covers off, I discovered one reason why this engine leaked so badly. The square cut seal between the chain cap and cam covers was missing and replaced with silicone sealant. Without this “o-ring” the sealant would have never stopped the flow of oil between these two parts. I’ll install all the proper seals to stop the leaking!

The only thing this much silicone will do is get into the sump and clog up the oil pick up.

The next step was to break out my head puller plate so I could remove the heads on this 330 engine. This plate used the rocker stand studs to attach to the head. Mild steel bolts are then held in place with nuts to push against the head studs once the head retaining nuts are removed.

The 1/6 bank came off with relative ease with only one stud showing the familiar corrosion from gasket weeping.

The 7/12 bank, however gave me a little more of a fight. With the head puller plate in tension, I carefully watched the gap widen between the head and the block, making sure I put tension on the puller to allow the head to slowly rise evenly front to back and side to side.

Generous application of penetrating oil, and steady even pressure allowed the head to slowly rise off the head studs. I’ve heard of heads cracking in half from heavy handed impatient hacks using brute force or the wrong tools to remove heads. These heads are getting harder and harder to find, or more expensive to buy, so taking a little bit more time and effort was worth saving these heads!

I eventually had both heads off the block and ready for the next step of the tear down.

Cylinder #9 had no compression, and it was obvious to see the problem. It looks like the valve seat fell out and broke apart in pieces. There were no signs of the seat, but the damage was found on not only the #9 head and piston, but parts of the seat were ejected into the intake runner and sucked into the #10 cylinder causing more damage in the adjacent cylinder. As bad as this looks, it’s all repairable with some welding and machining.