The restoration begins with the tear-down of the car. Photos by Brian Renhard, unless otherwise noted.
Project accepted, the Lancia was shipped to Oregon where the restoration was carried out.
On arrival, Jeff gave it a cursory once-over. "The restoration done by Pininfarina was really more of a preservation," said Jeff. "To their great credit, they did manage to preserve the car. But to think of it as being restored is incorrect."
"As it showed up, it really did look pretty good. Several people wondered why it would need to be restored at all, but that's because they didn't look closely or know what the car should have been." Jeff and his team did.
Some of the previous preservation work had involved taking off old non-working parts and replacing them with newer, sometimes better ones. Things like the original windshield wipers, which realistically didn't work very well, were replaced with new and more functional pieces. They just weren't the right ones. Same thing with wiring – which was entirely replaced by Pininfarina with modern plastic-coated wires, likely for improved reliability. "They worked well enough, and being newer were probably better than the original stuff," Jeff confessed, "but they looked like crap!"
Plastic-coated wires were functional, but not period-correct.
So disassembly involved taking off a bunch of parts and inventorying them, so the search for period-correct replacements could begin.
A closer look at major components showed serious problems. The sagging doors didn't fit right. The windshield was poorly designed and not built well, and restoring a bad design to original is no simple task. Just building a new one would have been easier, but not correct. The Lancia was running, but not all that well. Research came up with photos of the car as it was in the late '30s, and this car didn't look the same. The interior was simply not as the car had been built, and this was most noticeable on the door panels and trim.
The chassis was in reasonably good shape, given its age and history. It would be relatively straightforward to re-do, but getting it right would be be difficult due to the absence of an early photographic record.
Brandon opines that the challenge of the car, something new and interesting, was good. Brian calls it exciting. "We are all pretty passionate about what we do."
Bryan observes that "This was the most difficult car any of us have ever worked on. Every single time when we thought there was something straightforward to work on, it became a problem. Every time. Sometimes the only thing we could do was go home and come back to it later."
Rob recalls that for him, "The windshield was the single most difficult thing. We'd do it, it wouldn't fit quite right, we'd re-do it again. Several times."
Josh has the same set of recollections about the bodywork and paint. "It wasn't just this particular car. We've had several cars win Best of Class and go across the stage at Pebble Beach, and none was easy." Handed a body panel, his job was simply to make it perfect.
All on the team do share one particular memory. "If it hadn't been for this particular group, this car would never have been done properly at all. It's only because we are a team that we were willing to put in the work, the endless hours, the frustration, not seeing our kids and having it withdrawn because we knew we couldn't get it done properly to show it. We just kept on and got it done eventually."
No thought was given to Best of Show, but from the start the car was always going to go to Pebble Beach. It would compete in the toughest classes there. That meant the standard would be perfection, or as close to it as humanly possible.
Component removal revealed some serious problems with the bodywork. The original metal on the doors was very badly corroded, and the new door skins had been laid on over the old metal. In this current restoration, that did not mean reskinning the doors entirely. The second skins were also a part of the history of the car, and Jeff says that they always try to retain as much of the existing material as possible, even if it would cost less to re-do entire body panels. The same held true for things like the fender skirts. The team didn't build new ones – they restored what was already there.
"As these cars come apart, more and more gets revealed," notes Jeff. "There are always unexpected problems, most of which are unknown to the owner or anyone else." There are precious few shop manuals for automobiles such as this.
Removing the "new" skins and the old corroded metal would require re-doing much of the wood framing that made up the doors. Which in turn meant removal of the glass and winding mechanisms, which were carefully stored for later use. The original door skins carried the car's factory paint color, which differed from that sprayed by Pininfarina. Because these were covered over and not just replaced, the new paint could be formulated to match the original as closely as possible.
Brandon was tasked with rewiring the Lancia, using period-correct materials. A new wiring harness had to be fabricated, so careful notice was taken where the "new" wiring went so it could be replaced with suitable material.
"We just dove into it," says Jeff. The fasteners were unique to the car, so these were carefully removed and saved to be re-done, or if needed, replaced with better ones sourced elsewhere. "We just made a big pile of parts and stuff to get. Mostly I take it apart, but as I do I delegate what things are to be done by the other guys, so they can get started on their work. Everything that wasn't missing was restored, and not just replaced."
The engine, now removed, awaits shipment to England for rebuilding.
Bryan gets credit for most of the sheet metal work. Sometimes it involved renovation, sometimes remanufacture and replacement. There was a fair amount of body filler from the Pininfarina effort. It looked OK from the outside, but wouldn't do for this level of restoration.
Brandon notes that when the body comes off, he gets to start on the chassis and underpinnings.
It's important to realize that though there is an order to these things, it is not and cannot be pre-ordained. When parts come off, they should go back together in a certain sequence. It usually is the reverse of the way things come off, but not always. There are sub-assemblies that cannot be fitted unless and until something else is done first. That sub-assembly may well be ready before the other work is done, so it has to wait until everything else is ready for reassembly.
For example, the doors can't be refitted to the body without the windows being installed first. The windows can't be installed until the wood frame is properly re-done and aligned so it's straight. That process involves taking things apart, putting them together, taking them apart again and so on through sometimes several repetitions.
The chassis, though it was rusted and pitted, was repairable. The rear springs were extremely rusted, but present. "That's how you know it was the original stuff," notes Brian. "It was so bad it couldn't be new."
The firewall, showing more plastic wiring to be replaced.
Brakes and cables were in pretty good condition, somewhat more corroded on one side than the other. That seemed to fit with the known history of the car and its discovery, intertwined with a British hedge on one side.
Most of the wood used to frame the body was restorable. The few deteriorated pieces could be remade and fitted by hand. Sometimes the stuff on one side was the pattern for the stuff on the other side. That helped.
All four fenders had been patched at some time in the past, though the car didn't appear to have had significant collision damage. But the patching was done badly, so metal of appropriate thickness and type had to be formed and refitted.
The original trafficators (turn signals) were missing, but there were holes where they had been, so the team knew where replacements had to go.
"Remember, in the 60's this was just another old used car. It was 30-some years old, not considered anything very special at the time. No one suggested that it was to be completely restored to new – it was never really worth that. Then. Now it is." Jeff takes that perspective quite readily. There's no good reason to criticize past efforts to preserve this car. The real miracle is that it has survived at all so it can be restored properly. Many similar classics simply disappeared, whether from the war or from the neglect of indifferent owners. That these two sister cars are still around is remarkable all on its own.
The mechanical parking brake assembly.
Brandon shared some personal frustrations with the current level of knowledge within the car hobby today about these sorts of restoration efforts, their cost and the time it takes to do them. His frustrations are aimed at the television restoration shows that are all over cable networks.
"These shows give a really bad impression to many people about how this is done. They see a basket-case car brought in to a shop and the shop owner says they have one week, sometimes two, never as much as a month to completely re-do the car so it can be shown at SEMA or taken to auction. It just doesn't work that way with these cars."
"If you tried to show these restorations in a one-hour television show, you'd have to do it in time lapse photography."
Once the car is disassembled and the list of needed parts is made, time starts to stretch out. A windshield wiper motor for a 1936 Lancia can't be found at O'Reilly's, so locating a replacement requires networking. One guy in Washington state, whose personal passion is Alfa Romeos, is well-connected to a network specializing in finding old parts for Italian cars. The windshield wiper motors weren't fabricated especially for this particular car – they were used on a number of pre-war Italian cars. But there still aren't many around anywhere in the world. Who has them? Finding out takes time.
Another Oregon contact specializes in pre-war Mercedes, and can help source the German-made parts of the time. Bosch, for example, supplied parts to car makers all around Europe. Some of those are still available at a price. But which ones? What will it take to get exactly what is needed for this car?
The Lancia's current owner had a friend in England with a reputation for rebuilding old Lancia motors and transmissions, so those were shipped to him for rebuilding. The work took a long time. When the parts came back, Brian assessed them as not being in the condition required to show at Pebble Beach. So he took much of them apart, stripped and repainted visible components, and sent others out for replating. There were a number of improper fasteners, and those were replaced. The water neck for the engine cooling system was too far gone to be used, so an entirely new one had to be fabricated.
The Lancia's serial number plate.
The data plates throughout the car had corroded past usefulness. Nostalgic Reflections, a company in Washington state, already had the artwork from the sister car, so new replica data plates with the correct numbers were made. The same was true with the grill badges; the old ones were beyond restoration, so new ones were fabricated.
Even the instrumentation was redone. The sister car had its speedometer calibrated in km/h; this one originally was done in mph. That fit with the observation that this particular Lancia had been sold in England, and not anywhere else in Europe.
Piece by piece, one by one, the restoration focused on individual bits, not on the entire car. The team was constantly putting things together, taking them apart to fit more precisely, then putting them together once again. Usually several times.
The chrome had been sent to England to be refinished after two other engraving shops simply couldn't do it. After an initial time estimate of six weeks, it came back nine months later. Total time on the trim took two years. (Other work and other car projects filled the group's time meanwhile.) When it came back, several pieces had too much copper, so when attempts were made to fit those to the car, they were off — sometimes by as much as an eighth of an inch. Close, but not good enough for Pebble Beach. Other pieces had nickel showing through across the length of the piece. That would be noticed, so it was simply not acceptable.
Jeff and Bryan spent considerable time grinding the refurbished pieces to get the fit right, then those were packed off to Brightworks (in Ohio) to be replated once again. This time they came back properly redone.
Six weeks before the show.
Though various components and sub-assemblies had been done and fitted to the car, nevertheless the assembly work remained. From a collection of beautifully restored components, there really was a car in there somewhere.
from Hemmings Daily – News for the collector car enthusiast http://ift.tt/2ggUzth
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