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 are some cool photos of the Ferrari 212 with red oxide primer and going into the PPG DCC Concept single stage satin black. As you can see from the air in the paint room, there is quite a lot of over-spray in the air which is necessary to get the entire frame coated.

Red Oxide primer on Ferrari Chassis

Ferrari Chassis in Red Oxide PPG Primer

Primer and Satin Black paint on Ferrari Chassis

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

Here is a photo of the body on the 212 on the chassis. Since this photo was taken we have dialed in the wheel openings so, when steered with the suspension compressed, the wheels will clear the bodywork. The shape of this car is very exciting, another example of how it is hard to argue with the creative styling of these cars.

Aluminum bodywork close to finished

When gas welding aluminum a water soluble flux must be used to clean the surfaces and allow a nice flat and strong weld. We gas weld the sheet metal because the welds stay as flexible and supple as the surrounding material allowing you to roll the sheet metal and the welds through the English Wheel Dollies.

The problem is that if you do not get rid of all the flux residue, the aluminum will “salt away” under the paint and cause bubbling in the finish. In these photos we are using soap and water and brushes to ensure that there is no flux even in the deepest crevasses. Even a tiny amount in a pin hole will ruin a perfect paint job.

Ferrari 212 body washing off flux

Removing flux from aluminum body

Here are some more images of sheet metal work to get the 1950 Ferrari 166 Touring Coupe closer to finished. So much of the aluminum is work hardened and cannot be repaired, so it has to be replaced.

This 1951 Ferrari 212 Vignale Coupe has some generic headlights that did not fit well or look good. I located some correct Marchall headlights, buckets and trim rings but like most projects, the were not a “bolt in” installation

When we stripped the paint from the headlight area we found that the aluminum was very thin from over zealous filing and sanding so there was not much good material to work with. Eben made a hammer form for setting up the new aluminum sheet that will accept the headlight bucket.

Headlight trim ring fit is so important on a classic car so great effort was taken to make sure everything looks great prior to paint work. We think that the front end of the car looks so much better with the correct classic headlights. Now, how well will the paint match?

We spend a considerable amount of time and effort to find out what our Ferrari 212 project looked like from new. Like most early Ferrari racing cars, the original bodies were scrapped in favor of new designs, destroyed in races or in the case of this car, a combination of bodies from different cars! We understand that this car has the rear section from Ferrari 340 serial number 0030 grafted onto the chassis.

This car has had a few cycle fender style bodies and had a very tidy Vignale body that was later altered to be a station wagon looking thing. With the current body having little historical significance (except that it has been clothed in this aluminum for 40 years) we wanted it to look as it did when it raced in the 1951 Mille Miglia.

With some help from noted historians we located a photo of the car at the staging line for the ’51 Mille Miglia. This is a excellent left front shot and we found a right rear shot of the car when it was just completed at the body builders “Carozzeria” or body shop. With these to photos we were in the position to call on a specialized design shop to scan both the car and the historical photos to create a body buck for shaping the new aluminum body.

A man named Mike came in with nearly a million dollars in scanning equipment to “shoot” the car to get the overall proportions and details. He sprayed the entire car in a flat white paint and placed dime sized reflective stickers on every part of the car. He stuck them to the wheels and tires, to the engine block and gas tank, and the suspension arms and frame rails. He spent two days digitizing every nook and cranny of he car while saving it to his computer.

He took this digital image to his design office and layered the current scans over the historical photos and figured out what the car should look like with all proportions accurately detailed. We were able to review the renderings and alter them slightly to make it look accurate to the human eye and could easily alter things like the amount the headlights stuck out or how tall the spare tire opening should be.

With the digital image complete, it was programed to cut MDF plywood on a CNC router to form the stations of a full-sized body buck.