Here are some photos of the 212 Fontana Carretto Siciliano! We did some sorting and tuning after the 2010 Mille Miglia and the car is delicious. It is probably the most fun I have ever had driving a car be it on the public roads or race track. The car is so balanced and dialed in, brakes are great and it has incredible power.

Nose shape

Delicate

Interior deluxe

I have seen this style final drive differential on later Ferraris like Lusso’s but didn’t realize that early cars like the 212 had this odd arrangement. Instead of spider gears and side gears, the car has these “chicklet” metal tabs that are forced between the axle drive hub and the outer case of the differential carrier. The inside “hub” has a different number of relief cuts in comparison to the outside case of the carrier so there is always pressure to make the car go forward while acting as a limited slip mechanism. You will have to study the photos carefully, we didn’t take great pictures of it all together so let your imagination do the work to understand the process

Ferrari attempt differential

Ferrari 212 differential

We performed a first “major service” on this GTE after overhauling the engine which includes a valve lash, head torque check and overall inspection of the work we did after the first 1500 miles. I found that the water pipe that goes from the back of the cylinder heads to the radiator to be leaking so I installed one of our stainless steel reproduction ones. The owner asked us to prepare the car for a race weekend at a VSCCA event at Lime Rock Park in CT. so we installed overflow bottles, a battery cut-off switch and put safety wire on a few things and shipped it to the track.

The car performed beautifully on the track and was the prettiest car at the event. The owner of this beauty drove it home to New Jersey from CT.

250 GT GTE 2+2

Here is a cool idea for a car hauler, a roll off container that goes flat on the ground and pulls right up on the truck. I saw this at Lime Rock Park a few weeks ago, cannot remember what was in the back of the truck…

Car Hauler

Mr. Garfield organized a tour through our area last weekend and scheduled the participants visit our shop. It’s odd that all of the cars were 911’s, I thought there may be a few 356’s or front engined cars but most of them were heavily modified 911’s. There was a totally stock looking early 911 with an engine sound suggesting a displacement of well over 3.0 liters and a beautiful 1979 SC with a late model 3.6 liter and subtle modifications to keep the car on the ground at speed.

I really like this orange car

911 Orange coupe

Tour of Porsche

Axle oil leaking

Here is a reason rear brakes don’t work so well on an early Ferrari. With the “2+2″ Ferraris generally the benchmark of deferred maintenance, I informed the new owner that we should look into these seals as suspect. Sure enough….. the seals we took out were cracked hard plastic, original 1962 material! Yeah!

We ended up buying that 1936 Ford Convertible that I described earlier but instantly sold it to a man in PA. Unfortunately the previous owner lost the key so Dennis came in to pick the lock, here you can see him using a shove knife to push the tumblers up and turn the cylinder. We got the lock picked but the lock pin that stops the steering shaft is totally rusted stuck in the housing and will need to be seriously worked to get out.  I think that I will weld a bolt to the pin and use a slide hammer to break it free.

The car has some rust but overall it is straight as an arrow and the hard to replace things such as the grille and headlight trims and lenses are perfect. Hopefully it gets restored to original specification and not turned into a Street Rod.

Ford V-8 85 Convertible

Picking the lock on the Ford

My father took a look at this spectacular 1936 Ford Convertible that has not been driven for 40 years. It is all original but as you can see, it needs everything. I always fantisized about going through all of the mechanical units and leaving the cosmetics as they are on a car like this since everyone seems to want perfection and gloss. I’ll take crappy original to over-glossed restored!

Ford V-8 1936

This is quite a rare car and we are going to buy it to stack in the rafters with all of the other cars we seem to never get around to fixing.