These 330′s look so spectacular to me when painted in a bright color like this light blue or silver. We’ve done tons of work to this car to make it run and drive better than it looks.

Something about the rear of the car, the “C” pillar area above the rear wheel looks so great, so clean and pure. How can you argue with Italian design!

Ferrari 330 GT Blue

Made from dairy cow bones

Sculpture

When we needed a new camera last year, I asked Johanne to get us a new “bomber” camera and she came back with a Canon D10 which is designed to take the shock of dropped and handle the everyday abuse of our shop. It turns out that the camera can also shoot under water! I took these photos of Homer’s newly crafted fish under water, notice the trout that are swimming up next to the shiny painted fish!

Homer is really enjoying making these fish and would like to sell them so if you are interested in purchasing one let me know and I can connect you with Homer

Fish real and fake

Underwater fish

Eben built the 212 body from pictures, as you may know. His metal work and sculpture are fantastic – that’s why we insist on taking him away from his art – to work on ours. Here’s his website showing other projects he has been working on besides the damn Ferrari.

http://www.ebenmarkowski.com

Last night a friend called me to take a look at his newest obsession, creating a water effect with sheet metal and paint. These panels are beautiful to see in person and I am impressed at how great they look in photographs. The technique for painting the fish is amazing.

Clear coat is not intended to go over bare metal, it typically needs primer or some sort of surface prep but the stuff is so high quality and hard, I have a feeling it will hold up great.

Fish in Clear

Water panel

I brought this up from Florida for a friend of a friend. Cool.

Alligator

Eben wanted to display his art work at a recent show in Burlington so decided to hammer out another Rhino. This time it took only a fraction of the time because the form in which it is hammered out on was sculpted and ready to go. To make the display at the show more dramatic, his wife painted the form orange to have hanging next to the completed copper sculpture.

In many areas on the finished piece, the copper has been stretched so much that it is thin as tissue paper, delicate enough to poke your finger through.

Rhino Mold painted in oil orange

Rhinocerous in 1/1 scale

Homer is really closing in nicely on the burning man time machine art car, he has the clock like gearing nearly finished for the carousel and the 20′ tall wheels that  can be broken down for shipping to the event are outrageous. Ruby, Roman and I stopped by after a swim in the river to see the progress and were blown away by the size and strength of the wheels. David at Mainly Metals has a water jet cutter and is making all the gears so they can get just the right speed of the carousel, one turn to every 7 turns that the 20′ wheels turn.

I have volunteered to come up with the propulsion and was toying with having a diesel engine run a generator that would run electric motors but this seems a bit much for me. We settled on hydraulics to get her moving slowly in the desert and pawed through a number of catalogs to come up with the components necessary to get us rolling.

After looking at all of the components individually and seeing the huge variation of gallons per minute rates, pressure capebility and overall compatibility of hydraulic pumps to valve bodies to motors I had a great idea, cannibalize a skid steer loader! Someone else engineered the relationship of engine to pump to valve size to motors. Even the hose size and fluid reservoir are thought out for the flow and cooling capacity that we need.

Jeff used to work at our shop but now works closer to his home at a farm equipment sales and service place. I called him to find out where I could buy a cheap skid steer. He had me call Jon in Bridport and for under $3000 we had a operable machine that I began to disassemble right away. The 3 cylinder engine came out easily, in fact I slid it out of the machine and right onto the hydraulic lift table by myself. Now I have to find a way to remove the pump and hoses without having to undo all of the lines so the system stays clean and I can identify the scavenge side and the pressure side.

I am excited to work tomorrow to strip the motors for the wheel movement to see what we can use for the art car. With the chains and jack shafts that are in the drive housing maybe we need to do very little to hook the motors up to the wheels.

Burning man sculpture part

Here is Roman standing near the wheel

3 cylinder diesel engine

Hydraulic pump to be used in art car

Here is a nice photo of the 212 chassis with a fresh coat of primer and paint. We used a red-oxide primer from PPG and a special satin black That I feel is the perfect gloss in PPG’s DCC Concept line, a single stage finish. The finish is DCC Concept line is Acrylic Urethane and it is so tough and goes on so easy that it seems impossible anything work and look so good.
When painting something like this with all the tubes and welded areas, the bulk of the chassis is over-sprayed. It is quite an exercise to get under, upside-down and all around to ensure a good coat on all of the tubing. It is nice to know that the chassis will be coated to be preserved for another 50 years or more.

PPG DCC Concept Acrylic Urethane Ferrari