La Tempesta

Last night I visited the garage of a fellow Montreal owner and had access to a vice and a hacksaw. In order to disassemble the droplinks from the main roll bar, I had to cut the bolts. There was no way to get a hold on the silentbloc/bush cores to twist them off the bolts. Since the bolts in question are unique to the Montreal, I have sent a request to Häckner GmbH, asking about availability. The roll bar is strictly non-essential for moving the car up onto a car trailer, so in case the bolts take forever to reach me, the Monty will long since be placed in long term storage.

The reason for the latter, is of course that the lease on the current garage facilitiesis expiring, and by 1. October I must be packed and gone. The only available garages I’ve managed to find, are for storage only.

The drop link attachment bolts have Alfa Romeo part number 105.64.25.974.00.

The bushes and cores are, as previously mentioned, very hard to remove from the somewhat rusted suspension parts. Not that there’s much rust on the underside, but the cores are about the only exposed metal under there. And naturally, they have developed a dust-like rust layer which makes them stick to the attaching bolts.

I was offered an anti roll bar from a GTV (I believe), complete with new bushes and paint. Unfortunately, the Montreal  rear anti roll bar is not the same as on the rest of the 105 series. Not only does the Montreal roll bar accomodate the wider track width, but it has different attachment points for the droplinks and a notch to accomodate the fuel pipes.

The Montreal rear anti roll bar:

Closeup of the droplink attachment to the main bar. GTV droplink to the right for comparison:

Some weeks ago I started removing the bits & pieces from the rear suspension in order to change all the bushes and the shock absorbers. The latter, Bilsteins, were bought from Classic Alfa over a year ago, so the replacement job on the tired old Spica shocks is way overdue. I started with the obvious: removing the rear anti roll bar. The anti roll bar bushes on the trailing arms simply crumpled away when I took the droplinks off. Can’t imagine the bushes had any function at all, and it’s no wonder I sometimes felt like driving on the door handles through curves.

The cores were unfortunately a different matter. They had rusted to the rear bolts and had to be treated with a blow torch and twisted off. In the process, I managed to destroy a vice grip that supposedly was guaranteed for life. That’s how stuck they were.

The last of the four large bolts, connecting the passenger side trailing arm to the chassis, was also rusted and stuck to the core of the bushing. Because of the exhaust pipes and the splash guard, there was little room to apply a large hammer, but after generously applying the blow torch to the bolt, it came loose by means of a pneumatic ratchet.

The rear bushes on the trailing arms were quite saggy, and the spring cups had no rubber shims. That explains my theory of the Montreal being lowered. Well, it isn’t. It just had saggy bushes

Next time I’m in the garage, the anti roll bar is coming off, and if Richard at Classic Alfa has the bushes in stock, I’m ready to actually replace the bushes. I’ll probably blast the components and apply some fresh paint to them as well. When everything’s cleaned up, the rebound straps are up for replacement too, and then it’s time to do the front.

Time for a little update again.

I bought myself an ignition strobe lamp and proceeded to check the ignition on the Montreal a few days ago. Since the Spica parameters were more or less tuned in last autumn, idle rpm have been a little high and slow driving in low gears have been quite a stuttering experience. Following Bruce Taylor’s advice in the Ignition Distribution section on his website, as well as the shop manual’s procedure, the advance at idle was adjusted. To my horror, I couldn’t even see the AF mark on the flywheel when the engine idled, but after a few moments it appeared in the inspection hole. The latter is somewhat obstructed by the speedometer wire attached to the distributor, but the hole is viewable nevertheless.

In the end,  the advance was adjusted a few degrees. As a result, the idle was a little lower and a lot smoother. A lot of the backfiring went away too. Next job now is to take the distributor out and (finally!) clean up the mechanical advance weights in the base. When returning to idle, the rpm is erratic and takes a lot of time to settle down.

Also coming up: replacing the shock absorbers and a lot of bushings. Doing 150 km/h on a straight requires a little too much work to feel safe now, and the swimming around corners doesn’t do La Tempesta justice. I’m hoping to get some pictures taken while working on the suspension. The word is that the 105-series Alfa Romeos are easy to work on with regard to this.