This thing is going to be an absolute Italian hotrod. Excited
I wish I had something newsworthy to share. Since January I have had in hand all the parts I have ordered for the gated six conversion, the 599 MAF swap, and the Fabio headers and valved muffler swap. I'll just resort to that common alibi for stalled projects, that "life happens." In my case, sitting here at age 70, life includes the approach of serious old age. So I really need to get going, as the days are numbered when I can reasonably expect to be able to operate a 600 horsepower, six foot wide car with a stick shift.
I totally get it! Many of us have been there. when I built my ‘69 Meyers Manx vintage Baja racer it took 3 years with a LOT of help from specialists. It’s good to make a deadline but often it’s the journey!
That describes most of my projects, automotive related or not. There is ALWAYS unexpected bumps to sort.
Today was a big day for naturally aspirated 12-cylinder gated six Ferraris. Down in Monterey RM Sothebys sold a '95 Ferrari F50 for $5.5 million, plus buyer's fee. But in the really big news, up here in San Leandro I finally got started on my project, to convert my '05 612 Scaglietti to three-pedal operation, swap in a Fiammenghi exhaust with 6-into-1 headers and valved mufflers, and add some silly carbon fiber aero bits at each end. Also, I'll be adding a set of Aragosta coil-overs with Roberuta pneumatic lifts at all four corners. These are supposed to arrive late August, early September. What I did today was to remove both front and rear belly pans, to take a look at the motor mounts and the transmission mounts. I was watching the series of Normal Guy Supercar videos from about three years ago, where NGS Dan was installing in his 599 GTB the first-ever EAG cable shifter conversion kit for this model. Along the way Dan said that a mechanical shifter makes it crucial to have solid mounts at each end, to keep everything lined up. So I put the inspection of these units at the top of my to-do list. It was a good move. Here are some photos. The driver side motor mount: Image Unavailable, Please Login The passenger motor mount: Image Unavailable, Please Login The driver transmission mount: Image Unavailable, Please Login The passenger trans mount: Image Unavailable, Please Login In my estimation only the driver trans mount looks like it has any service life left at all, and even this one is far from showroom new. So all four are going to be replaced. Here's a bonus shot of the posh workspace where all this work is coming to pass. I'm recording the process, with the idea to post up a series of videos on my own YouTube channel. In this screenshot I'm holding up my gated shifter assembly, built by Robin Hastings, for the viewing pleasure of my imaginary YouTube audience. You can see on the garage wall the Fiammenghi headers and the tailpipe section with Fabio's tuned H-pipes, and also the Madly brand (made in China) carbon fiber aero bits: Image Unavailable, Please Login
Fantastic work! Ready and waiting to help with any questions you have along the way. Sent from my iPhone using FerrariChat
Yesterday (Wednesday) I removed the passenger seat. The driver seat presented a puzzle, which I solved today. Each seats' rails are secured to the chassis with five bolts, two in front and three in the rear. The odd bolt in the rear is on the outboard rail. On the passenger side, you can slide the seat forward far enough to get a wrench on the forward member of the outboard pair. On the driver side, you cannot. Here's a photo showing the issue: Image Unavailable, Please Login This is because there is a U-shaped clip at the front of each rail, mounted to the toothed rack where the motor-driven pinion rides, moving the seat back and forth. I assume the purpose of these clips is to prevent the driver's seat from moving so far forward that it contacts the steering wheel. These clips pop right out, but then you also have to remove the carpeted floor piece where your feet go. This part is simple too. You pop off the carpeted bit with the rubber mat on it, then you unscrew four screws, one at each corner of the floor piece. The reason is that this floor piece also interferes with the forward motion of the seat. On the other hand, you must remove this piece anyway, to get at the ECU. Here's a picture of the interior sans seats. This photo also shows the hole that the carpeted floor piece covers. You can also see the five bolt holes for the seat rack: Image Unavailable, Please Login This hole is the location of one of the car's two ECUs. There's a mirror image hole on the passenger side, also home to an ECU. Those with sharp eyes and experience removing their ECUs will notice that mine is missing. Here is a photo of my two ECUs sitting on the washing machine: Image Unavailable, Please Login I was surprised to find that the ECUs are not bolted down. They fit in a sheet metal box and are held in place by adhesive backed foam strips. You can see the remnants of these foam strips at the bottom of each ECU. How to disconnect the connectors gave pause, but I figured it out. There are two connectors per ECU. They are held in place with a triangular locking mechanism, that you pull out from the side. As you pull, the triangle lock slides open and pushes the connector free.
Bill, thank you! I absolutely could not get my driver's seat far enough forward to remove the mount bolts. I will give your technique a try.
Yeah, I remember the seats being a puzzle the first time. I think it’s quite common that when seats are refitted the little clips that restrict the max travel of the seat are left off, as I’ve seen cars now that don’t have them. I suppose like you said it’s a safety thing in case the seat malfunctioned and tried to move itself all the way forward whilst you’re driving? Not something I’ve ever heard of happening, but I guess it’s not impossible. Sent from my iPhone using FerrariChat
I was thinking it's about the rear seat access feature, that the seat automatically motors forward when you flop the seat back forward, and Ferrari thought it would be inelegant if the headrest contacted the steering wheel during this process. I think ease of access is more important, so I'll leave the clips off on reassembly. The auto-stop feature of the power seats reminds me of something, that I always tell rear seat passengers to hold their knees firm as the seat motors backwards toward them. When the seat back makes contact and feels the resistance of a passenger's knees, it stops moving. This auto-stop feature lets the rear seat passengers set their own legroom.
Today I removed the console. The one tip to share is regarding the rear seat AC vent. First I carefully pried off the outer ring with a plastic trim tool. Then I inserted a hook tool past the vent's flapper valve and rotated the tool 90 degrees, to hook it around the barrel of the vent. Then I grabbed the tool's handle with vice grips and gave it a slight jerk. The tube popped right out. Here is a photo of the vent and two of my hook tools: Image Unavailable, Please Login Here is a photo of the hook tool, hooked around the bottom of the vent barrel. You can also see the two gear wheels which, together with the vent ring, open and close the flapper valve. If your passenger vent is not blowing air, and/or the flapper does not respond to rotation of the vent ring, it's because these gear wheels have disengaged. My vent does not have any stops to limit the motion of the flapper valve, and if the vent ring pushes the upper gear wheel too far, the upper gear wheel will lose engagement with the lower wheel. Image Unavailable, Please Login Here is a photo of the hole where the shifter tower will go. It's interesting, given that only about 200 out of 3,000 chose the gated six option, that both the top insulation layer (with the hard black backing), and the bottom layer (with the shiny silver backing) are perforated, to facilitate trimming them to fit a shifter tower. Also, there is an aluminum plate to fill the hole in the floor pan, with bolts at each corner whose positions match the lugs on the @brogenville shifter tower. Image Unavailable, Please Login Speaking of the @brogenville shifter tower, of course I had to take the money shot with it sitting in its eventual resting place: Image Unavailable, Please Login
Sexy! Plus, I hope you are tracking your hours….I’ll be curious to see if it is 40 or 70 or 100 or what type of hour total for a first timer going slow and steady.
Yikes! Last post August 26?!! This project was (is?) getting dangerously close to "lost interest" status, the kind of car you see for sale all the time on Craigslist or as a barn-find project on YouTube, where the owner got started on repairs or mods and let go of the rope. Not on my watch! After a five week hiatus I'm back on the job and intend to push through to completion. Catching up: It was on September 7 that I went down to Union City to pick up my reflashed ECUs from @sammyf. Here they are, proudly wearing their 360trev stickers and ready for installation: Image Unavailable, Please Login
In my August 26 post I mentioned the removal of the rear seat HVAC vent. Inspection revealed that the butterfly valves in all five of the similar dash-mounted vents suffered from the same condition as the rear set vent, that they were all stuck open. Put another way, the large circular surrounds did not operate the butterflies. Someone somewhere had posted that a fish hook removing tool, available on Amazon, makes a good tool for popping these vents out of their cylinders. Here is the Amazon listing for the one I bought: Image Unavailable, Please Login I used a cutoff disk and a sandpaper roll on my Dremel to modify one of them, turning it into an effective Ferrari vent removal tool: Image Unavailable, Please Login
Here is how the butterflies in these vents go wrong. First, here's a side view of my rear seat vent and my left side dash vent. I've removed the double-sided idler gears from each and placed them below the vents. Image Unavailable, Please Login Here's a closeup of the dash vent, that I took to show the crack in the barrel of this vent, running vertically from the top of the barrel and around the mounting boss for the idler gear. At the top you can see the teeth on the circumference of the trim ring; what would be the rack in a rack and pinion steering gear. The fat half of the idler gear meshes with this rack, such that rotating the trim ring rotates the idler. The other half of the idler meshes with the fan-shaped gear, which is attached to the butterfly's shaft. (Unfortunately when I set up this photo I placed the idlers upside down, and they're now screwed back in place, meaning there'll be no more photos of the disassembled condition.) Image Unavailable, Please Login There is some kind of stop inside the trim ring, intended to limit the travel of the rack. Unfortunately these stops wear out or can be overridden with anything more than a gentle touch. When there is over-travel in the fully closed direction, the lower gear on the idler disengages from the fan gear on the butterfly shaft. This needs to happen only once, because these two gears will not re-engage without pulling the vent out of the dash, unscrewing the idler, and assembling the gears back into engagement. Here is a photo of the mechanism in full open position. As you might be able to see in the photo, when you rotate the trim ring to full open, the idler gear locks against the fan gear and trim ring travel will stop (unless a gorilla or a five year old child is operating it). Image Unavailable, Please Login Here is a photo of the mechanism in the full closed position. It's pretty clear to see in this photo that the idler gear is about 5 degrees of rotation from disengagement with the fan gear on the butterfly shaft. The only thing to prevent this is the stop in the trim ring. But if this stop is worn, or it's overridden with excessive force, the trim ring won't stop moving and the idler gear and the fan gear will disengage. Image Unavailable, Please Login Here is what I did to try to fix the problem. I got some #4 stainless steel screws and screwed them into the barrels of these two vents, to limit the travel of the butterfly: Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
In this project I had removed the seats and the three or four piece console with relative ease. Now I'm going under the dash, to remove the pedal box and install the clutch pedal. Now nothing is easy. Nothing wants to come apart. First was the brake pedal. The first step in brake pedal removal is to uncouple the brake booster shaft from the pedal. Here is this assembly as depicted in the parts catalog: Image Unavailable, Please Login Here is the entirety of the instructions set forth in the shop manual: Image Unavailable, Please Login It's probably hard to grasp this assembly goes together (or comes apart) from these photos. But here are (a) my brake pedal assembly, consisting of a cast aluminum shaft with a white plastic insert housing a socket for (b) the ball at the end of the brake booster shaft, and (c) the black plastic retainer which snaps into the socket in the white plastic insert on the brake pedal. (The ball-end shaft in my photo is actually part of the clutch master cylinder that will ultimately be installed in this car. Also, the retainer and the ball-end shaft are 180 degrees out of their as-installed position. I set up the photo this way to show the parts better.) Image Unavailable, Please Login This photo shows a screwdriver inserted in the slot as depicted in the very unhelpful workshop manual disassembly instructions. I'm not going to click the black retainer into the white bracket to take a photo of the as-built condition, because in my opinion there is absolutely no way to separate the retainer from the bracket without cracking both of them, on both sides! Given that the white plastic bracket is permanently installed in the brake pedal, with no replacement parts available, and that the parts houses want from $700 to $1100 for the 612 brake pedal, you'll want not to separate the retainer from the bracket more often than absolutely necessary. Image Unavailable, Please Login Here's a photo of me holding the black plastic retainer above the white plastic bracket, to show what you're aiming for with your screwdriver when you stick it in the slot. Specifically, you're trying to push the white tab to disengage it from the slot in the black retainer. You need to do this on both sides, simultaneously, to pop off the retainer. Image Unavailable, Please Login Here are photos of both sides of both parts, showing the carnage I discovered after I did pry the black retainer loose from the white bracket. You can see the massive fasteners Ferrari has used to attach the bracket to the brake pedal, fasteners that were not intended ever to be undone. The photos depict these parts after I had tried my hand with one of those plastic welders. You insert a staple into the the two connectors on these things and press it against your plastic part. Electricity heats the staple and it melts into the part. It works very well, although the Super Glue I used to secure the crack on the right hand side of the white bracket caught fire and bubbled up a bit. I think I didn't let the glue dry completely before heating it up. I chose not to dress up the wound, thinking that I should leave in place as much material as possible. There were two cracks on the left side of the brake pedal, and a single crack on both sides of the black retainer. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Although it took a full month to be delivered, I did buy a replacement for the black plastic retainer. As a belt and suspenders measure I also intend to run a sheet metal screw through each side of the assembled retainer and bracket. The purpose of this assembly is merely to retain the ball at the end of the brake booster shaft on the clutch pedal's rebound stroke. The clutch's pressure plate is exerting tremendous hydraulic pressure on the shaft, while this plastic assembly is exposed to comparatively mild forces. My sheet metal reinforcements, in combination with a new retainer and my plastic-welded bracket, should be even stronger than the original. Image Unavailable, Please Login
With the brake pedal free of the brake booster shaft, it was relatively easy to push out the brake pedal pivot shaft and pull the brake pedal free. Here's a photo of the brake pedal with the shaft in place. You can see that the inboard end of the shaft has a step machined into it, such that the shaft pulls out from the pedal box only in one direction, outboard to inboard. The two clips in the photo slide into the slots cut into each end of the shaft and secure the shaft in the pedal box. Image Unavailable, Please Login
This project has stalled on the extrication of the pedal box from under the dash. The issue is that the brake booster shaft sits in a fully enclosed hole in the pedal box. So the only way to free up the pedal box is to move it far enough forward that its front (firewall) surface clears the tip of the brake booster shaft. The problem is that there is a steel frame bolted to the chassis to support the steering column and the dashboard. (Yes, there is a bit of structural steel in a 612!) At the point where you need the clearance to allow the brake booster shaft to clear the pedal box, this steel frame has a vertical plate on which are mounted the passenger compartment fuse box and the OBD II port. This vertical plate will not allow the pedal box to move far enough out from the firewall to clear the brake booster shaft. Here's the parts catalog diagram showing the pedal box, circled in red. This drawing also shows the brake pedal, the brake pedal pivot shaft and, grayed out, the brake booster and the tip of the brake booster shaft: Image Unavailable, Please Login Here's the parts diagram showing the brake booster and its related gaskets and spacer, circled in red. The additional spacer-looking thing, grayed out and having a squiggly shape, is intended to depict the firewall. You can also see the tip of the brake booster shaft, circled in blue. What you get from this drawing is that the four studs at the back of the booster extend through the firewall. In fact, these four studs, secured with nuts, are what attach the pedal box to the firewall. (Two additional bolts, higher up from the four studs, also hold the pedal box in place. Image Unavailable, Please Login In the previous drawing you can also see the clutch master cylinder and its gaskets and spacer. This drawing shows the steel frame, including the vertical plate which houses the fuse box and which also makes it impossible to get the pedal box to clear the brake booster shaft. Image Unavailable, Please Login Here is a photo of the pedal box, with the nuts removed from the brake booster's two bottom-most studs, and showing the brake booster shaft. The pedal box readily slides off booster's studs and comes free of the firewall, no problem, but there is no way to get it to clear the brake booster shaft. Image Unavailable, Please Login Here is a side view of the fuse box, mounted to the vertical panel of the steel frame: Image Unavailable, Please Login Here is a photo of the back of the fuse box mounting plate. This is the part that ain't gonna move, and unless it moves it ain't gonna let the pedal box clear the brake booster shaft. Image Unavailable, Please Login Here's a photo where I've tried to show the pedal box bumping into the steel frame: Image Unavailable, Please Login
I have decided that the way forward is to go under the hood and pull the brake booster off the firewall and the brake booster shaft out way of the pedal box. This will require detaching the brake lines from the brake master cylinder. Since this project will also include swapping in some Fiammenghi headers, I am removing the factory headers. This is where the project stalled. The last day I worked on it was October 5. Here's a photo showing the status as of today. The brake booster and master cylinder are circled in red: Image Unavailable, Please Login
