'58 600 resto-mod to Abarth 850 TC nurburgring

Brief update. Car is getting close to completion. Here's a couple of pics of the engine compartment. More detail and photos another time.

Engine and transaxle are in. Suspension, brakes, sway bars, coolant pipes, etc. are all done and I just got the car off the dolly and onto wheels on the ground. A bit of interior work left to do, rear side windows, wire up and install the instrument cluster, install door glass and a few minor odds and sods.

Engine is almost 100% done. Need to check valve clearance, gap the plugs, add some oil & coolant, set the timing, finish the carb linkage and install new studs on the top cover, secure the lines to the remote oil filter and then I think it's ready to start 'er up and do the break-in procedure. I sure hope I don't find any oil or coolant on the floor.... :eek:

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So I mentioned a few days ago I hoped there wouldn't be any oil on the floor. Well, there was. I was so close to firing it up. :(

Turns out that the person who built the engine (a specialist engine shop in the US no longer in business) neglected to reinstall a 10 mm dia. core plug on the left side of the block near the front. It was apparently removed to drill a hole into the main bearing. So out came the engine. :mad:

At first I was searching all over the internet for a 10 mm dish style core plug and also locally at a few machine shops. No luck except for one Fiat parts vendor and could have taken a week to arrive. The following day, I started a major cleanup in the garage and the first box I looked through had a total of 4 of the plugs I needed. No idea why I ever got them, but there they were and exactly what I needed. The stepped hole is pretty close to 10.00 mm and the plugs were 9.96 mm. I needed something to drive the plug in place and to check the hole for roundness or damage and in my collection of almost never used (or maybe never used) tools I found a 1/4" drive socket that was 9.92 mm dia. Perfecto. I bought some Loctite made for use with core plugs (not cheap). Got it done today and it was actually easy to install. I staked it in place in several spots. That sucker better not leak now! Engine goes back in tomorrow. If I had only noticed this BEFORE I installed the engine, pfffft...
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Just got the front radiator shroud installed. The cooling system is now 100% complete.

There are precious few photos on the internet that show these style of shrouds and nothing that show how they were mounted. I'm not positive, but it could be that the originals were chrome plated steel and there was a through-bolt on them that went through the mounting hole on the bumper and the bumper bracket like how over-riders are mounted. What's available now is only fiberglass copies.


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First I had to spend a fair bit of time trimming and sanding the somewhat rough fiberglass shroud I got from a vendor in Europe. To mount the shroud up against the bumper, I took a length of 1/2" thinwall tubing and cut it lengthwise into 3 pieces. I welded the ends up and ground a curve into the ends and hammered a slight curve in the pieces to match the curve on the shroud. Then I took some M5 bolts and ground a curve on the heads and welded them onto the back side of the tubing pieces.

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After that I made a couple of shaped pieces from 14 gauge so that I could use two M6 bolts per side to mount to a bracket attached to the bumper. The brackets that attach the bumper to the body are from an early 600. They're made to heavy gauge steel almost 1/8" thick. Fiat later changed to bumper brackets made from stamped steel and I couldn't make them work to mount the radiator below them.

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I used stainless steel carriage bolts to mount the bracket to the bumper which is why the hole is square. I used some thin pieces of gasket material between the bumper and the brackets (the flat ones with a square hole) to protect the chrome. The radiator hangs off the bumper brackets with vibration isolators, sometimes called a bobbin. The radiator is an original Abarth item. I had a rad shop install a bleed/drain valve I salvaged off an old 600 radiator. (The yellow cord below the rad is for the battery maintainer to keep the AGM battery charged up.)

I painted the shroud with 3 coats of single stage urethane. When I went to the auto body paint shop, they asked me what color I wanted. I said I wanted it a light silver metallic. I pointed to a car out in their driveway with something that would work and said "kinda like that car". Turns out the color code is for a Chrysler... :oops:

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Only things left to do are the gauges and rear side windows. Then it's time to fire up the engine for the first time and if it will move, I'll get it outside and take it for a spin around our circular driveway before getting it licensed and hitting the open road. My plan was to get the car read for the annual local father's day Italian car show. I very much doubt that's going to be on this year. :(
 

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That plug looks good and well staked. Makes you wonder what else the engine builder forgot, fingers crossed. If I was building that engine (if it was torn down so it could be thoroughly cleaned) I’d tap that hole and use a threaded plug. Besides my Italian mistresses I like old Landcruisers and quite a few have lost their engines due a similar plug working its way out.
 
That plug looks good and well staked. Makes you wonder what else the engine builder forgot, fingers crossed. If I was building that engine (if it was torn down so it could be thoroughly cleaned) I’d tap that hole and use a threaded plug. Besides my Italian mistresses I like old Landcruisers and quite a few have lost their engines due a similar plug working its way out.
Yeah. I'm keeping some fingers crossed too. The plug wasn't the only thing so far. The builder installed a roller bearing in the end of the A112 crank instead of a standard bronze bushing. First problem with that was that the input shaft would not slide into the bearing because the ID was too small. I took a spare input shaft into a specialized machine shop and they tested the hardness of the shaft and it was nowhere near hard enough for a roller bearing. The roller bearing was a larger outside dia. than a Fiat 850 bushing so I had to get a special custom oiltite bushing made. Luckily we have a transmission shop here that does specialized tranny work including machining various parts when needed. Getting the roller bearing out was a really difficult job and would not come out the usual method. That was annoying to say the least. The particular engine builder should have known way better.

Tapping that hole would have been the better way to do it. I still can't remember buying the 10 mm plugs. I have the crank out of a 1300/124 that is built around a 124 OHV engine. Instead of using stock 10 mm core plugs on the 124 crank, they tapped the holes and used threaded plugs. For something rotating at something like up to 6-8K rpm, that's probably a good idea.

So yeah, I hope that is all that could possibly go wrong...
 
Tapping that hole would have been the better way to do it. I still can't remember buying the 10 mm plugs. I have the crank out of a 1300/124 that is built around a 124 OHV engine. Instead of using stock 10 mm core plugs on the 124 crank, they tapped the holes and used threaded plugs. For something rotating at something like up to 6-8K rpm, that's probably a good idea.

So yeah, I hope that is all that could possibly go wrong...
Great idea tapping the crank, we do that to Alfa engines too. Again we learn from history and loosing oil pressure at 8k is no fun.
 
Looks very good. I wish my car looked as good with your rear fender flares. I just beat mine out as much as possible to give more room. Recently added 195/60-13 Cromadoras and have to tolerate mild rubbing sometimes.
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