La Tempesta

Since I promised the rest of the family that the new room in the basement would be finished before winter solstice rolls around, I have (as you may have noticed) not done much on the car the last couple of months. Instead, I’ve been busy with a very different set of tools and paints. A small batch of tie rod ends and some other items are on their way from Classic Alfa, so the front suspension is hopefully coming back together some time in January or February.

For what it’s worth: I’ve promised to drag La Tempesta to NSKs Spring Meet in May, no matter the condition of the car

Not much have happened to the car the last couple of weeks since I’ve been busy with the last few details in planning CSM and helping with the event itself. Like last year, I spent four whole days on Vålerbanen as paddock manager. Shoehorning 155 race cars, camping trailers, support vehicles and whatnot into the cramped Vålerbanen paddock is a lot of work, but in the end we managed to pull it together. The weekend was at times extremely wet, but all the participants were happy anyway since they came to race, not to take a sunbath in the paddock.

This week I’ve mostly spent being tired and dizzy after too much fresh air, but tonight we gathered in the bunker for some Montreal talk, coffee and … well … more talk. Trond and Bjørnar showed up with their Montreals while Lars E. checked in by phone and expressed his regrets for not being able to show up.  In any case, we managed to gather half the Norwegian Montreal population again, and that’s not bad at all.

Bjørnar brought along a very nice electrics diagram in A2 format for the Montreal, which a friend of his had done on a plotter. This will come in very handy since zooming in on a tiny computer screen tends to remove the bigger picture too much.

All in all a very nice evening! Next informal meet will probably be in Kongsberg with Lars E or at Bjørnars place.

A while ago I was discussing the removal of the rear wheel bearings from the axle shafts with some Alfisti, and we sorta agreed that pulling the bearing off of the axle was a cumbersome and difficult job. I mean, where do you get a puller with a metre long reach?

One night I sat down to study the workshop manual and how the special tools are applied to have the job done, and it suddenly dawned on me that the engineers in Arese was thinking a little different from us mere mortals: you don’t pull the bearing off the axle to remove it, you pull the axle out of the bearing!

I don’t know if it’s just me, but that’s thinking somewhat outside the box

A very slow day in the garage today. I had just mounted the cooling sump back onto the differential housing when I heard the unmistakable sound of an Italian dry-sumped V8 exhaling through a Tubi exhaust. It was a friend of mine stopping by in his F355, out for a spin on his day off. About one coffee later he was off again, and I went about painting the splash shields with the secret-sauce primer. Since the paintbrush was spent anyway, I did a touch-up of the trailing arms and applied some Owatrol on the rebound strap mounting plates.

Trevor Fay in Australia is making some rebound strap reproductions in canvas (not the usual plastic-y things), so I took a picture of the distance between the body mounting holes for him. Other than that, nothing really happened

The weather is almost summer-like here at the moment, with temperatures in the low twenties and a mild, light breeze. The roads are slowly filling up with cars and motorbikes that have spent the winter indoor, the road authorities are more or less finished with sweeping the public roads and plazas for winter sand and gravel, and the lawns are turning green. Not a bad way to spend a public holiday this …