We made a ton of progress this session knocking things off the to do list!
While I was changing the spark plugs Greg was hard at work (for once) finishing up the graphics on the car, looking quite professional now! A couple sessions ago we decided to redo the door graphics so that they would be easier to see so Tom & Greg painted a white background on the doors and hood to provide a better backdrop for the applied graphics, came out nice!

Greg finishing up the graphics

Additional hood graphics

Our redone door graphics

Our bumper motto, fitting for an Alfa!
During a couple sessions we were talking about various racing movies and our favorite lines and one that we thought particularly appropriate was from Days of Thunder…”Drive Through the Smoke” being that this is an Alfa (my Verde is up to two packs a day
). We asked one of Brian’s daughters to paint the quote on the rear bumper. Came out real nice, we might take some grief because of the addition she tacked onto the end of the quote :-).
While Greg was working on that Tom, Lon, and Brian were working on getting the fire extinguisher bracket and seat belt harnesses installed. The fire extinguisher bracket was installed on the transmission tunnel for easy access. I had made some mounting plates for the harness bolts out of some sheet steel I had lying around from one of my welding projects as we couldn’t find any of the minimum required size 3 inch washers locally, they did the job nicely. Now it is really starting to look like a race car!

Tom completing install of fire extinguisher bracket

Seat belt harness installed
While we had the car back on the lift so as to be able to drill the holes for the harness and put the mounting plates in I started working on the exhaust leak between the manifold and down pipes again. I had looked through my spare parts stash at home and found a couple more manifold gaskets that we thought we try between the side exhaust down pipe and the manifold to see if that would fix the leak. I took the whole thing apart (again) and put the new gaskets in and then put everything back together again and…….the leak was still there! Looks like one of the studs coming out of the manifold has most of its thread rusted away so I just can’t get enough bite to close up a little gap. It is runnable the way it is but I’d really like to get it fixed so I’ll be digging through the spare manifolds at home to see if I can get the studs out to replace them with a new set of studs (like I did for the drivers side manifold). The only problem is that the studs have a tendency to weld themselves in and shear when you try to get them out, I’ve got at least 3 or 4 like that in the parts pile. Time for lots of penetrating oil and heat along with a delicate touch!
After his grueling graphics session we find Greg in his traditional perch…

Greg in his usual perch…
While the car was still up on the lift we decided to drill the initial pilot holes for the rear brake cooling ducts just above the rotors. Once the car was back down Greg got up out of his chair (!) and tied off the the dryer hose for the ducts to the roll bar, still need to finish up the attachment to the floor. Due to the coolness (pun intended) of the install we figured that AutoDelta would be proud to have their name on our mod!

One of the brake cooling duct hoses
While he was working on Brian, Lon, and I were trying to figure out why the fuel gauge wasn’t working. At first we suspected the sending unit but Brian had two in his parts pile and when we hooked them up to the harness and tilted them back and forth (to simulate empty and full tanks) they didn’t register on the gauge either. I had also brought along another instrument cluster that I had in my parts stash that I know worked fine and it was also not registering the fuel level. We spent some time trying to figure out exactly how the wiring worked using a volt and ohm meter but were having problems, didn’t seem to be working as we expected. We knew exactly which wires (purple and purple with black stripe) we were dealing with and decided to trace the routing one more time (goes down the passenger side for some strange reason) only to finally find that one of the wires had been cut in half! Once we spliced it back together we had a working fuel gauge again!
While they were getting the wire spliced back together I worked on putting the dash back together.

Dash back together

Fuel gauge working again!
Almost forgot! We were trying to figure out why the car was running somewhat rough and had a tendency to die when the gas was hit so pulled off the air flow meter to see if we had forgotten to take out the screwdriver that we were using to force the fuel pump to be on without cranking the engine. Well, the screwdriver wasn’t there but Brian said the air flow meter flap seemed to be dragging on something so I pulled it off and cleaned the gunk out with some electrical cleaner and there was still a metal on metal scraping sound when the flap was pushed, not sure how that happens, did an elephant sit on the housing or something?!? Luckily I had brought along a spare so we put that on and started up the car and it was a night and day difference! Running nice and smooth now!
There were a bunch of other things that we also got knocked off of the the to do list:
Checked the cap & rotor - Not in the greatest condition but no worse that the used emergency spares I had in the trunk of my Verde so we just cleaned them up with a wire brush and put them back on.
Check alternator - Just wanted to make sure it was putting out more than 13.5V when the car was running.
Install rear view mirror - We couldn’t use the stock rear view mirror because the roll cage was in the way. Brian had one of those three foot wide rearview mirrors laying around so we installed that.
Install roll cage padding - Got that all installed.
Fix air box mount - One of the air box mounts, rubber mounting with two studs in it had sheered in half. We didn’t have spare (and couldn’t get the original off anyway) so we nano glued and safety wired it back on.
Get upper radiator hose away from fan frame - Not sure why the hose was touching the fan frame as all these parts were stock but we didn’t want it rubbing so we trimmed a little off the hose and pushed it farther onto the thermostat housing and that did the trick.
Safety wire the oil filter - Didn’t want to take any chances that the oil filter would spin off (Brian being anal!) so we put a large hose clamp on the filter and safety wired that to the old A/C bracket mounting point, there is no way it will spin off now!
Clean up engine bay and interior - I used compressed air to blow all the hidden leaves and other crap out of the engine bay, the air was quite thick with dust and junk for a while!
At this point we decided the car was ready for its first real test drive so we decided to do it the next night in a local parking lot after most of the cars had left for the day.