'79 308 restoration

I agree, it would need to be de-bugged and I intended to because im sure Ill find a few things, probably electrical things and heater cable adjustments, hopefully no oil leaks!

 

Sorry for the delay I havent checked out the thread in a while. The steering rack is done, I have all the hoses for the fuel and coolant pipes, the seats are done and waiting to go in. All the studs I removed from the engine and gearbox have been plated and I just got them back last week. So, I turned my attention to the engine and gearbox aluminum clean up. So far so good so Im assuming next week Ill be putting the thousand studs back in I removed then plopping the unit back in the car. Im debating what to do with the carbs. New ones are still available which solves the rebuild and replate issue as well as I have the originals ones left over that I can sell to recover some of the cost. The reason is I rebuilt them once already (didnt plate anything) and they work great but to do it again and replate every little component with the potential of losing small bits at the plater isnt appealing. So, ill put the engine in minus carbs while I think it over. Its coming along nicely and I hope to de-bug it this summer.

 

So here are the most recently plated fasteners, the last of them actually. I chose to do them in stages rather than take the entire car and engine apart all at once to reduce the overwhelming amount of stuff to keep track of. It might have cost me $300 or $400 more overall to do it this way but it was worth it to me. The engine is at work so I cant post pics of that yet, its just a clean aluminum engine waiting for the plated studs to go into. The valve covers, timing covers, mounts and intake manifolds are tucked away so I cant post them yet either. Once the studs are back in this week ill mate the engine and gearbox back together, dig out the rest of the stuff and post the shots. Im really looking forward to this being done.
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Its some sort of undercoating and when you scrape it off it has a powdery feel to it like plaster. So, its not rubberized. The US spec cars come with the aluminum panel covering the textured forward firewall. The rear wall has this stuff over the aluminum panel. I tossed the aluminum panels to reveal a nice new looking finish and now its just like the euro cars and thats fine by me.

I made more headway with the preparation of the aluminum engine and gearbox today, Ill be reuniting them wednesday. Ill shoot some pics before that anyway and get them posted here.

 

Thanks Guys (except gus) and thanks for posting a pic of a yellow GTB. I have the factory QV rims for it as well as well as the vitaloni mirrors. Im getting impatient and want this thing done yesterday. Ill keep the pics coming.

P.

 

I used eastwoods tank tone paint for the tanks. Didnt have to deal with the textured stuff since it was pretty good anyway.

As for the seats, I bought the skins used but were recently done by who knows. They had red inserts on black so I had a local guy transfer the multi coloured skins to my seats and re-dye them black. They turned out very nice and they look and feel new.

I priced some carbs quickly and im looking at $2K for the 4. Im probably better off rebuilding these again since they are the correct original carbs and having the bits plated to look new again. Total cost would be around $350 to do all 4 myself.

 

just dont hit a bridge....

 

Some of the engine parts as of this afternoon. I spent some time reinstalling the plated studs in the gearbox and engine block. The upper cover for the diff is sand cast so I glass bead blasted it. The transfer gear cover was acid washed as well as the block, gearbox and assorted other items. The valve covers and timing covers were also glass bead blasted but are tucked away at home. They look just as nice. I had debated painting the block and gearbox out of desperation but some hard scrubbing and several hours made it clean enough to leave natural as original. Tomorrow Ill install the pans, flip the gearbox over, drop in the carrier and ring gear, check the adjustment and install the cover. Then Ill drop the engine onto the gearbox and continue the stud installation, the belts, tensioners, intakes, covers, take more pics, etc and get it home to plant it in the engine bay for the first time since 04.
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Thanks for the postive feedback, everyone here has been supportive of my sickness, lol.

So, today I installed the differential and housing, several more studs and finally the engine back onto the gearbox. I still have to remove the cams to continue the detailing, valve adjustment and cam seal replacement. Its easier for me to simply lift the cams out and slide the new seals from one end of the cam to the other rather than mess with the plastic cam gears. During disassembly I measured every stud, nut, bolt, screw and clip as well as inspect for colour. You can see the minor difference in stud design from one to the next and they all have their special place to go. If I went on memory at all, I would be screwed right now. I measured every dimension including the threaded lengths because there are several different studs of the same overall length and thread size but threaded more on one half than the other. Its crazy really and would be insanity if notes and thousands of pics werent taken. Some of the studs are silver, some gold, I inspected them all as they came out and I found a combo which comes down to the supplier to ferrari and whatever they had, ferrari used. It might have made more sense to plate everything gold or silver rather than a mixture but thats the way this car was when I took it apart.

Next Ill install the intakes, do the cam stuff, and go forward with getting the engine ready to go back in. I plan to paint the headers with a black high heat coating which will stand up to 1200F temps. Im not going to ceramic coat them, thought about it. I saw a display engine from ferrari of a 308 engine and it had black headers. Being a US spec car that had the heat shields originally its safe to assume the pipes were bare stainless so no colour is correct but I cant leave them natural.
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