Termometro gauges, olio and acqua, in Celsius. New beveled glass jewels,  newly machined bezels and restored movements. Now I have to replace the protective housing with nickel plated ultra-flex material and recharge the capillary tube. Originally the tube was filled with freon but now we have to use purified argon since freon is hard to purchase since it is banned due to the terrible impact it has on the atmosphere.

Termometro

Temperature Termometro

Fuel and oil pressure

Here are the two pressure gauges, the one I created, the BENZINA, and the one we based it on, the OLIO pressure. I used a thick acrylic urethane paint with lots of catalyst to make the needles white. It was done in the original fashion with a heavy build up of paint that I “floated” on the part.

The gauges are almost finished, I started on restoring these late last summer (ah, how time flies by) and as you may remember from a past entry, I had to make one complete gauge that was missing on the car. We had the oil and water temp gauges as well as the oil pressure gauge but old photos show that the car had a fuel pressure gauge so I had to create one from scratch. Since we had to make one, we had to re-make many parts of the other gauges so they all match which meant fabricating new beveled-edge jewels, bezels and faces.

The original faces were 60mm aluminum discs with an acid etch screen for the font. I used a different process of clear anodize the disc and laser engraving the font into the aluminum which gave an identical contrast to the originals. Using the oil pressure face as a template, a graphic artist created the art work to make the “benzina” and instead of 0-10 Kg/Cm2 we used a 1/10th scale of 0-.1 scale. He had to create the artwork on all of the gauges since the fonts are so unique and the laser engraver wanted Adobe Illustrator file instead of a jpg file.

The bezels were scratched and ugly we we had to make new ones, not so easy since they have to thread onto the case using a super fine 1.0 thread pitch, a 65 mm by 1.0 thread!

The Benzina pressure gauge uses a 1/4 scale movement and no one makes a low pressure mechanical movement so I had to adapt an electrical movement and install a special sending unit that could register the super low (5-10 PSI) scale.

A water jet shop cut out the delicate needles from brass sheet and I made a bunch of tiny spindles and pegs on our lathe to complete the package.

So many sub-contractors and suppliers to make a set of gauges work for this car, and I am so happy with the final product!

Fuel and oil pressure

These gauges are made by Smiths for Touring, a company in Italy who built bodies for Ferraris in the early 50′s. They built bodies for other brands like Maserati using light tubing for an armature and thin aluminum for the “skin”. They called this style of construction “superleggaria” or Super Light.

Since Touring of Milan built the body, they also outfitted the car with an interior and all the little delicate detailing such as door release handles and had Smiths make these beautiful gauges.

After photographing a number of Touring built cars with this style of gauge, I found  most to have a beige/tan background color where these gauges appear to have always been dark blue. Maybe because the car was originally dark blue? We carefully stripped the paint and could find no evidence of another color so we had them restored as you see them.

Smiths gauge

Touring ferrari smiths