Here goes with some photos of the (ongoing) restoration of my 1964 Giulia Sprint Speciale. The first batch show what a big job this was. The pictures are taken at DTR European Sports Cars where I bought the car from Paul de Turris just over 12 months ago. I am not sure that either they or I realised the full scale of the undertaking at the time...











This seems to take forever. I'll post this to see if it has worked and resume later..

Tonight's last batch, and also the last of the "before" photos. By way of background, the car was complete (despite the impression from the pictures) with the correct engine. The nice man at Alfa Romeo's museum confirmed the delivery date and original colour (Alfa Red, unsurprisingly) when I gave him the chassis number. Alfa's records don't match engine numbers to chassis numbers precisely, but they do show that the engine number is in the correct block of numbers so there is every reason to believe it is the original engine.











More to come (tomorrow)

To be fair, Paul took the risk out of it by agreeing a fixed price upfront. Based on previous work he had done, I was confident that he would not skimp on the job. As will become clear from subsequent postings, he hasn't let me down!

Fabulous, mahoosive restoration.

What's the blue coupe next to yours?

I think the blue car is a Fiat 124 Coupe.

It certainly is a big job, but we are now 12 months in and the car is painted and being reassembled. The panel work, prep and painting have taken around 1,000 hours I think! There was also about 20kg of lead cut out from the car (you can see it clearly in some of the pictures).

Tonight I'll try to post the next batch showing the start of the panelwork, including the new sections the guys at DTR fabricated using their Englsih Wheel.

Paul is such a perfectionist. He saw original unrestored SS's in Austria and Italy and measured them up to compare with mine. Turns out none of them are symmetrical (I guess to be expected for a low volume hand made car), and mine was the closest to symemtrical of the three. After doing that Paul noted that the sills in my car, which had been previously replaced, did not have exactly the profile they should have had - so he replaced them. For good measure, to give it some extra rigidity (see how narrow the pillars are), he made the new sills with box sections. I joked with him that he was adding weight, and he pointed out that whatever he had added certainly weighed less than the pile of lead on the floor...

And work begins...







At this stage I was started to wonder what I had taken on...

But at least the new bits were shinier...

And then they went into manic phase and started replacing the solid bits that "weren't quite right"..








That's it for tonight. Next time: some oily bits, and maybe even some paint.

Ready for painting.

And while all that was going on...