LOL! Words rarely heard when working on any Lamborghini. I just always call it an obscure Alfa or Fiat that wasn't imported here. That worked with the radiator shop ...
That's exactly what I do. Turns out the ball joint boots are now available from Cicagnoni or in the US through MrFiat, although more expensive, they are easier to source through these guys.
Gary's usual procedure it to take the car to the chassis shop to check for straightness and suspension point pick up alignment left to right. I figured I'd go down the same route. As it will turn out, even though the chassis shop did a decent job with the front, the rear was no where near right even after they handed it back to me. The pictures here are of the work that we done at the chassis shop, the cut you see is to the driver's side to adjust the top suspension point locations. In doing the pull the weak, rusted areas came to light and the amount of rust repair that the car was going to need became painfully apparent. The rust flakes on the table are my car! Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
After I got the car back from the chassis shop, I was not convinced about the chassis shop's accuracy, so I took the Lamborghini chassis dimensioned drawing and carefully measured the car and the pick up points. It quickly because apparent that something was not correct to the dimensioned drawing both in the front and in the back. At this point I decided that I needed to construct a jig to precisely locate the suspension points on the car so that we could go about fixing it. For me this was a crucial endeavor in that if the car's suspension points are not accurately located in space, even after the chassis is pulled by a reputable chassis shop, the car would never be straight and true. I set about building a jig on which we could bolt the car onto and make whatever adjustments needed to be made to the chassis to locate the suspension points per the factory spec. The Lambo dimensioned chassis drawing is easy enough to "read" for the front suspension, but the rear suspension points are much more tricky because they use a reference plane off the center of the car and a 4 degree angle off of this point in space to locate the lower rear suspension mounting points. The factory drawing also has some dimensions not identified in their drawing and I needed to have those to ensure accuracy of the jig (and subsequently, the car). I had a friend of mine redraw the Lamborghini chassis drawing on Autocad so that I could obtain exact measurements to where all of the suspension points needed to be, but in particular to locate the rear lower points. Using Autocad allows you to directly measure the drawing to find the distance between two points, angles, etc. Once the jig was constructed, I carefully measured and remeasured the location of the suspension points vs. the Autocad drawing. As you might imagine, even though I had spent a LOT of effort to get everything just right on the jig, until you can verify in real life, you always have doubts. We tried fitting my car onto the jig, but we couldn't get it to fit properly. Gary aligned the center point of the chassis with the (approximate) center point of the car. The fit was off. At this point we were not at all sure if the car was off or if the jig was off. Fortunately, Gary had a completely stripped car in for a restoration that appeared never to have been in an accident and did not seem to any rust or show signs of twisting (a very rare occurrence). Gary and his guys put that car onto the jig and were able to verify that the jig was in fact correct and that the pick up points on the jig were dead nuts correct. So now we knew the jig was right and we could now be confident that any discrepancies were on the car. We then put my car onto the jig and were able to easily fit it onto the front upper pick ups, the rear upper pick ups, but something was going on with the front lower and rear lower pick up points; they weren't mating with the jig. We quickly discovered that in fact all of the front suspension points (uppers and lowers) on 1021 were correct (and therefore, the cutting and adjusting that the chassis shop did to the front was correctly executed), it is just that the lower front pick up points on 1021 (and very likely all of the pre-production cars) do not match the Lamborghini drawing (!!). At some point (which I presume occurred after the pre-production cars), Lamborghini changed the lower front suspension point locations in what Gary and I can only conclude was an effort to increase the car's caster. We discovered this because we went around and measured the location of the upper and lower front suspension points on a few cars and 1021 and 1024 have the exact same front suspension locations, and they, in turn, varied from every other Miura in Gary's shop. This is something that I don't think anyone other than a few people in Italy and perhaps Bob Wallace knew had occurred. It is not identified or discussed on any of the Miura books. Even Gary who's done dozens of restorations was unaware of this caster change. Pretty cool stuff. The first two pictures are of the jig, prior to welding in the cross members where the uprights of the jig would be. The uprights are where the suspension points are located. The last two pictures are of the Miura that was used to verify the accuracy of the jig, including a close up of the rear pick up points of that Miura bolted onto the jig. The remaining pictures are of the jig with my car. You'll note the picture of both front uprights mounted on the jig, with the top front mounts of the jig bolted onto the chassis, but the lower mounts unbolted, showing where the jig lower front pickups are located with respect to the lower front mounts of 1021. As you can see, the jig places the lower front points further forward than they are on 1021, this would increase the caster angle on the later cars. Increased caster angle would provide better high speed stability. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
Those last 4 photos would make me gulp Alberto. This reminds me of the conversation I had with Giulio Alfieri (Maserati) on the lawn at Concorso Italiano back in the early 1990's. I had just finished going through my low mileage Bora and while it didn't have any of these sorts of problems because it was so young and had led a charmed life I did find plenty of raw unfinished steel simply covered with undercoating and any chassis painting (monocoque really) was pathetic. Having rectified all of that I felt compelled to ask him why with such a beautiful and expensive car did they not pay more attention to rust proofing and some of the glaring oversights (well known by then) in preventing this and similar issues. This was his first visit to that event and he was so astounded to see so many of the cars he helped to create in such fantastic condition. Better than new he exclaimed in Italian. Then he explained that they didn't think it necessary because they expected their customers to just buy a new car every 4-5 years and that the old one would be destroyed. It explains much.
Interesting! I had exactly the same discussion with Mario Marazzi last saturday when they had my Islero on their stand at Milano Autoclassica. He was amazed by the car saying that it was much better than when they produced it!
All of those stories about the quality of the old Italian cars had to some kernel of truth to them. While there's no doubt that all classic cars generally get finished better than when new the Italians it seems skipped a few steps back then ...
Most here would know that some of the Miura production drawings are available on line: http://www.tecnostoria.it/tecnostoria/catalogo_auto_en.jsp?Comando=Archivio&Id=15&Tipo=vettura&Mar=Lamborghini There are efforts by others to capture undocumented changes and present the chassis drawing with improved clarity: http://www.huskyclub.com/tav18.html Regards, SteveB
Yes they are, that's why they were difficult to source. They are pretty close to unobtainable from what I am told, as well as based on my searched.
Hi Alberto, Are the suspension arms, axles, and such the same? Maybe these first builds used 400 parts that were later revised? Any blueprints for suspension arms? I don't think Lamborghini or Bertone fabbed the suspension arms, any info on how this was accomplished? great thread Craig
Yes, they appear to be exactly the same. They did increase the length of the front suspension bolts to the later cars. I ordered the later style (longer ones, available from Lambo, but the heads are not stamped; the shorter ones like on my car are NLA) because I wanted to add a bit of reinforcement to the front suspension pick up points. Not that I am aware of. I compared mine to others and they look identical to the ones used later, except that on my car they stamped S and D on the front uppers. The replacement front upper I sourced does not have that stamping, I guess they figured out they are exact same and can be switched from one side to the other, so no need to identify which side it is for. I do not have any nor have I ever seen any. Unfortunately I have nada on this either.
Great stuff Alberto!...couldn't help but notice the little 'parts and grocery getter' in the form of the white duetto in the background, is that your driver?
No doubt this is tru. Thanks. Thanks Craig. Not mine. In the shop I work out of. It's been out of commission for a few years and undergoing mechanical work to get back on the road.
Haven't posted in a while. So while in real life the car is at the painter's currently being stripped to bare metal, within the sequence of this thread, the rust repairs had to be undertaken. Gary Bobileff's metal man Nigel is an absolute artist when it comes to shaping metal. All of the metal work about to be pictured below was done by Nigel. Nigel started with the floor pan of the car, at the front. This is more or less typical rust for a Miura. The first and second pictures are from the front looking toward the back of the car upside down. As you can see from the floor pan before any cutting took place (second picture), this early Miura has seat pans that are "dropped" compared to the rest of the floor pan (the fifth picture shows the seat pans still on the car, with the rest of the floor pan removed). This drop was intended to provide a bit more headroom and is documented in the Coltrin book. Later Miura's don't have this step in the floor pan. The 9th picture shows the new floor pan next to the original. The beads are a bit smaller than the originals and these were redone to the exact bead width as the original, following the exact same pattern. The last two pictures show the new metal in place. I'm probably not going to be able to explain this well, but it's a very interesting detail. The u shaped piece at the center of the car in the next to last picture was not originally installed in Miura number 9 and almost certainly not on any of the prototypes or pre-production cars. This reinforcement piece was installed on later cars. The reason for the reinforcement became evident to us because the metal piece shown below this u shaped reinforcement member is what the gas tanks sits on. Below it sits the floor plan nearest the road surface. The separation between these two pieces allows air through the front of the car to the interior and out the back. Because there was no reinforcement between these two pieces of sheet metal, the sheet metal where the gas tank sits on had been crushed over the years and what was originally about a 2 inch separation to the lower plan had been reduced to about a 1 inch separation. I had the u shaped reinforcement piece installed (as used on later cars) even though not original to this particular car to keep this from happening in the future. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
Pictures of the new front rails being installed. At the time, Nigel told me that the pedal box was about ready to fall off. Apparently, they tacked it but never actually welded it in. That of course has been fixed (second picture). While we are at it, we added a little bit of reinforcement (note X pattern inside the rails). I still have no idea why the damn pictures are posting sideways. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
Out with the old and in with the new. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
Wow, that is amazing reconstructive work. Always interesting to see cars being resurrected especially as it will probably be better than new when done.
