The BORA

Congratulations!

Motor oli: Castrol 20w-50 high zinc formula
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09QXWLY2Y?ref=nb_sb_ss_w_as-reorder_k0_1_15&amp=&crid=38MS53YH76XT2&sprefix=castrol%2B20-50w%2B&th=1

On the transaxle I plan on using Red Line 75W-90 The Pantera guys seem to like it
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00YKHULJO/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Ivan

 

Very nice review of this topic by 71Satisfaction: https://www.ferrarichat.com/forum/threads/the-bora.333525/page-14#post-145323928

 

thanks for that info and for entertaining my prior questions by email. appreciate it!

Dean

 

Yes. The linkage is in sections connected by knuckle joints which are secured to the rods with tapered pins that have a thread on the smaller end and it's secured with a nylon locking nut.
You put a sacrificial nut on the threaded end, support the backside of the joint properly and drive them out either with a press or a hammer.

But put the car up on four jack stands and test the linkage for smooth operation first. Then check the condition of the boots.

 

Thanks for posting this as it saves me from a ton of duplication. Art did a nice job of documenting what he had which was decidedly non original. The pins shown in this photo demonstrated that they are not a tight fit via taper.
This will induce accumulated slop from each coupling of a joint to the shafts slop in the linkage. I'm also not a fan of the seals on that center section as the volatiles of the grease can escape at edges of the of the 4 seals utilized.
This is why I utilized a piece of straight silicone hose between the supports which was filled with high temp grease maintained via a zerk fitting. Today I think I would utilize a piece of tubing with the hose on each to seal it to the supports as I had some trouble with zerk fitting in the silicone hose. Another issue is allowing for thermal expansion.

I made numerous forays into the desert heat of Nevada & California at sustained very high speeds. This was as a part of entering my Bora in the Silver State Open Road race. It gets monstrously hot in this environment and everything gets stressed. Maybe the Sahara is worse but what nut job is going to take Bora to run their. This one did it in Nevada and the car is absolutely magnificent on Highway 50 there. Driving your Maserati on high speed roads with long sweeping turns and vistas is an amazing experience. The Bora does it superbly too. With that as a backdrop this is how I did heat testing on my Bora. Here's what I learned the hard way.

1. There's nothing up front in the trunk and vent at the top of it that you can do unless you're willing really cut op the car and totally redesign the airflow across that radiator with a very sloped vent extraction system like you see on cars that do this successfully such as the GT40 and others. I dabbled with an adjustable extraction vent on top of the top vent which I tested in the desert. The results were piss poor. I wasn't willing to cut up my car or lose that wonderful trunk.
   
2. The inner CV boots explode at speed from inflation due to heat from the exhaust and anal like sealing of the joint when being assembled. So eventually I include a vent via a plastic tube from a can of brake clean filtered through a piece of felt. This finally solved that problem and damn it was annoying as hell to arrive after long wonderful journey for tech inspection only to see the engine compartment sprayed with the nasty black grease and a pair of blown boots
3. Those needle bearings in the central linkage support shaft dry out quickly under that high temp environment. But with sliding rubber lipped seals on the outside ends of that assembly everything remains well sealed and lubricated. you can also freshen up/ replentish the end tire central horizontal rod assembly via the single, central zerk fitting from below if you locate it properly.
   
4. Several components in that engine bay require their own heat shielding which I accomplished via double walled SS shield that I had fabricated when I lived in the SF Bay Area. I also swapped out the gas tank's aluminum shield for a single wall stainless replacement and upgraded insulation.
5. The LHM equipment such as the reservoir and regulator got shielded with the double wall SS as well, mostly via a shield to stop the heat from the exhaust manifold. They glow cherry red at flat out speeds. The pump was left alone as it is in the open air flow.
   
6. The fuel pump(s) got a small double SS shield as well.

So operating in conditions such as these the biggest culprit is the piss poor airflow out of the engine compartment. In fact the air dams into the engine compartment and lifts the rear of the car at high speed. Air actually then flows forward via the horribly unsealed central tunnel of the interior compartment. Drive more reasonably and these issues become much less of a problem. I too have an upgraded, thicker and with more fins per inch radiator. At those speeds fans are not an issue but for regular around town driving they are. IMHO no cooling system is going to be able to extract all that heat especially after all that steel becomes heat soaked WO better airflow through the engine compartment.

Look at the Thepenier Group 4 designed Boras and see what they did about this.

In the end I wasn't willing to cut my car up like that but that's what's needed. Modern mid engine cars are designed to have much better air flow through the engine compartment. The Bora is a very old but handsome design with some unfortunate operational design choice if you want to go hot dogging it but ... I have to say that in all the early forays to this race it was the Pantera guys with their 500+ HP custom cars who broke down the most. Usually after 10-15 miles.
They eventually got it all figured out but those were very heavily modified cars.

 

I need to correct #2, the CV boot issue, from the preceding post.
I did not utilize the tube, that was my first idea but that would place the tube too close to grease and there could be no filter.
I drilled a small hole in the flange side cover plate of the transaxle and glued the felt (about 3/8" thick) on the inside portion to cover the hole but not seal it. Despite being tightly fitted to the transaxle flange it seemingly is not airtight and allows the the pressure inside the boot to equalize. I never experienced same the boots expand let alone explode after that. BTW, I first observed them expanding while checking them on my way to the race before the they exploded the second time but that was out in the desert and I couldn't do much about it there. So they exploded again.

 

Dean, nice to hear you acquired a Bora!

These vintage of Maserati are not complicated to work on for a mechanically inclined DIY'er like yourself. A quote that I live by, which Dave Burnham pointed out: "These Maseratis were put together by human hands, so you can do it too."

You already found the references on Ivan's website, and there are a lot of topics covered here too of course, and Bob gives a good summary above, just proving how passionately we love the Bora here. They are really well sorted, reliable and attractive.

And as Bob alludes, there can be heat build-up and airflow issues around the radiator, so improvements in those areas are a topic of interest here. I've installed my own heat shield fabrications around the starter and shift linkage, eliminated the AC evaporator in front of the radiator, decommissioned the AC altogether, etc.. .

I got my shift linkage out of the engine bay without removing much. I have small hands, so if the exhaust header is in your way, maybe this is an opportunity to install Euro-spec headers? .. which are right there against the linkage.

Regarding servicing the shift linkage .. and the tapered pins that secure the linkage U-joints: If you take it all apart and go to reinstall the tapered pins, DO NOT tighten the ocknuts very much. Just torque them down so the tapered pin pulls itself snug in their tapered hole. The reason being the pins will be far easier to remove when they need to be serviced again, hopefully not before another 40 years. But the pins will perform their duty just being seated snuggly in their tapered holes. Overtightening them will only make them harder to remove: I had one hell of a time removing my Bora's pins and had to replace them all.

However, on my Khamsin, the same pins (used on the Khamsin's steering shaft) were installed just snug, and they all came out flawlessly. I was very grateful to the person who assembled those pins gently.

Cheers,
- Art

 

Thanks Art,

Can you tell from this pic if the car has headers?:


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It indeed has headers. I see the bundle of snakes buried back there

 

I'd like to wrap all that with some titanium wrap but it'll be a chore doing it all with the engine in situ.

 

Yeah that would be rough if you were trying to wrap each individual primary pipe, any particular reason why? I didn't think heat from them was a big issue as I've never seen a Bora with wrapped headers.

 

No, the primaries are likely too difficult but those middle tubes that go from the header to the mufflers I think were wrapped from the factory with asbestos and a spiral wrapped aluminum cover. plus wrapping those pipes and the ones going to muffler should look better than rusty pipes.

 

Yes, I wrapped those 'secondary' pipes (the bright metal segments of pipe in your photo) just what it sounds like you plan on doing. Those pipes curve right past your CV boots. The radiant heat can pressurize the boot and tends to expel the grease inside. Bob (staatsof) had this happen, and mine did it too. So I bought some non-asbestos wrap from Pegasus Racing, just for the length of exhaust pipe around the CV boots.

I use heat shields near the headers at the engine block because I have heard from a good variety of sources to be cautious when wrapping tube headers. Thermal degradation can occur when a lot of heat is retained, and the metal warps, welds crack, etc. I had one lean cylinder that cracked a weld on the original headers before I got around adjusting the carbs.. That was the occasion for me to buy the Euro headers.

Here is a picture you can reference, with Euro headers above, and the original US headers below.

Cheers!
- Art

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Yes. There’s a company that specializes in heat shielding for cars and they have all sorts of wraps and heat shields in every size. I’ll post a link later. I’ll plan a heat mitigation project and post the results here. Right now praying to survive this hurricane without too much damage

 

heres that link
https://www.designengineering.com/products/heat-control/

 

I did mine in situ but I think I aligned the horizontal shaft when the engine was out. I supported the back side of joints/shaft well and used a small sledge hammer to loosen then up. One of them I had to replace. THEY ALL GOT ANTISIEZE ON ASSEMBLY.

That was in 1989 so a lot of these newer heat insulation products for cars didn't exist. You had to make everything from what you could get. Since I was close to some of the NASA suppliers I got enough yardage of a silicate glass woven cloth to wrap around my heaters in situ. It doesn't look very elegant and it's held in place with SS wire. I'm not sure how much good it did. The car didn't run any cooler. This came after having the headers coated in something call Jet Hot hi-temp coating that just burned off under extreme conditions. Next I tried aluminizing them. The aluminum melted DUH! and I had aluminum icicles on my headers!

One other heat failure I encountered happened on my drive home to SF from Oklahoma city. I wanted everything to stay stock in the emissions system so that I could pass California emissions. That's something it never did. I registered the car in a non emissions testing county instead. But the combination of high altitude, winter gas, warm day and those damn thermal reactors turn them into mini blast furnaces. I was forced to cut the air injection pump belt. The Ebrake cable housings are lined with nylon. That melted and froze the cable in place.
My fabricated is SS Ebrake cables are covered with a slip on piece of silicone radiator hose. It's heat resistant, durable, flexible and insulates. My replacement cable housings have no nylon linings.

A bit of a warning about tightly wrapped headers. On my Maserati GOC race car. That's a twin turbo which they delivered with the most beautifully SS wrapped cast iron headers. The problem is that they cracked. The heat from the turbos was so intense (almost 400HP from a 2.0L V6) that where the turbos come close to the chassis in the engine compartments they crack the frames!

 

great advice and what a great community!
Since the car has headers, it may be that the timing was set or tuned to european specifications, but what are those specifications? Here is the plaque on this car. I it just a matter of setting the initial ignition advance, or dose the entire curve of the distributor need to be modified? Many more questions to come...
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Cant the special needs of 1) needle bearings in the shift rod near the header and 2) CV joints near the exhaust pipe be met by carefully choosing specific greases for each of these locations? The exploding boot and seal issue is it due to expansion of the grease itself and isnt there grease that doesn't necessarily have this problem?

 

Question 1.
- Yes, for the needle bearings, I've not heard of them getting pressurized by header heat.
- No, for the CV boots.

Question 2.
- It's the volume of *air* inside the boot that pressurizes from the heat, not the grease - although that gets softer. The grease is forced out by the air pressurization inside the boot. There *is* an air vent passage built into the rubber boot, but it's often collapsed shut or blocked by grease. You can probably find this passage and stuff some felt in it to prevent collapse. I should have mentioned my mitigation of the boot ejecting its grease included punching a vent hole at the center of each CV cap*, at its center - where is no grease.

*Hard to explain this 'cap', but each CV housing has a sheet steel cap pressed on to the outer end to 'encapsulate' the greased, moving innards. I don't have a photo of this.

- Art

 

Is this a joke? I've replace quite a number of CV boots and I've never seen anything like that? I probably sealed my CV joints too well for this application with high temp sealer on the front and rear cap.
As already mentioned the hole on the end cap covered with a felt filter is how I solved the issue. There was a father & son family in the Sacramento area who had a business manufacturing large scale rock crushing machinery for road building purposes, I mean gigantic stuff. They had a Bora which they modified to accept IDF style Webers. I have no idea why. They built a full custom welded aluminum manifold.S ome may remember that car. Anyway, both of them are gone now. The son was the racer, not of Maseratis, he's the one who told me about the silicone CV boots utilized in the racing community for that style of joint (Porsche 930 also various BMWs). He suggested the racing trick of a tube slipped under the boot clamp on the axle side but I was afraid grease would leak out around not through the tube.

I don't have photos of any of this because ... there were no digital cameras back then except at NASA.

 

unrelated question: Is the LHM reservoir on the Bora pressurized? I'm interested in removing it to paint it but not sure how involved that is. I seached a bit online but didn't see any how to on that.

 

No.

 

sounds like: drain, hose clamps, remove, paint, reinstall...just that easy? I was expecting worse LOL

 

If you want it to be authentic then you need the correct color paint and a new LHM label for the tank. Someone might have those, I'm not sure.
Your tank might be different than mine, on mine there's a side piece of translucent hose so that you can check on the level in the tank.

 

https://www.grainger.com/category/power-transmission/shaft-couplings-universal-joints/universal-joints?searchQuery=silicone+universal+joint+cover&sst=4&searchBar=true&tier=Tier+4