These are some of the mundane jobs that make restoration so difficult. Fixing threads and getting stubborn fasteners loose.

Ferrari oil pans are a beautiful casting but on not a great material for threading in an oil plug. We have to repair these threads on nearly every Ferrari that comes in for an engine overhaul. In order to keep the customer up to date on what we are doing, we frequently label what we are working on.

The next photo is a brass plug threated into a steel coolant tube. In order to get this out, Eben welded the steel tube to a scrap of steel and used heat, time and penetrating oil to free the plug.

Fixing threads in Ferrari oil pan

Removing brass plug on Ferrari plug

Karl is restoring a Morgan for a customer and with the involvement of 3 different shops to restore the dash, here is the final product! The wood was sent off to a shop for re-finishing, the gauges were sent off for screen printing, rebuilding, and detailing, and the wrinkle finish and assembly was done by us.

I am not sure the exact details of the original buttery yellow paint, but over the years of exposure to the sun, it cracked and modeled like crazy, it looked very cool. Now everything is “perfect”, boring!

Morgan 4+4 dash panel

I sent off all of the parts on these carbs and sent them off to be plated. Once the carbs were clean, I re-assembled them and set them up on the test bench.

I did the same for the Fuel pump, sent off the parts for plating, installed a oversized rocker arm pin and installed new “guts”.

Carburetors from a Ferrari 250 Lusso

Overhauled Ferrari Pump

After this Daytona engine was overhauled by another shop, our customer asked us to get it to run correctly. As you saw from a previous post, we had to remedy a head gasket leak and a broken exhaust valve, two things that have a somewhat negative effect on how the engine runs.

After getting it running again, I have been struggling to get the idle to come down to somewhere in 1000 RPM range. It hhas been a struggle. While running the engine to tune the carburetors, I noticed a coolant leak in the “V” of the engine that was around the plug in the water passage.

Since I wanted to pull the carburetors to find out why they were not shutting off the air flow, I decded this is the time to fix those leaking plugs. I bought factory new super soft aluminum plugs but could not get them to seal so I decided to open up the hole and use a  1″ pipe thread plug to really stop the leaking. Not an easy job in the chassis!

Ferrari Daytona engine work