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1971 145 Express Competition Service Rally Car Restoration Project

WTF? A spare rallye cluster? I've never even seen one in person and you have 2? :omg:

Didn't I mention that before? I got really lucky there. It was in the Castrol oil box in the back just sitting there. It's a good thing I didn't toss the box around when cleaning out the back. The odometer on it only reads 995 miles, and it looks pristine, so I have to figure those miles are accurate.

Thanks for the article link. I'd love to see that film as well.
 
After taking all of that in, I began cleaning the engine bay. Look how dirty it was before:



And after several hours of elbow grease I got it looking like this:



I was amazed to see how much dirt and grime was on everything. Twenty-five years of dust and dirt that had settled there.

What was your "elbow grease" to clean it up? Engine bay does look really good now.
 
What was your "elbow grease" to clean it up? Engine bay does look really good now.

Carb cleaner on the carbs and linkages. GUNK engine degreaser and water on the rest.

BTW, the original color of the car was Pacific Blue, and you can see that they never did paint the engine bay during the original build. There are many areas where the subsequent paint jobs are peeling and the original blue is holding up. I was told that the "second" owner stripped to metal before painting the translucent red lacquer, but the evidence isn't bearing that out.

I'm waiting to see some color photos to confirm, but my hunch is that they oversprayed in silver, masking off the original blue for the racing stripes that appear black in the B&W photos.
 
Definitely a labor of love. Jason I see you've busy. My project not so much, a little stall.
 
I'm going to continue to post photos of the most rusted areas. I was concerned when I first got it, but as I peeled back the layers I found that surprisingly there is actually plenty of good metal left. New body panels - floor pans/butt cheeks, inner/outer wheel wells, etc., are all available, so there will be lots of new sheet metal going in. A lot of what's there can be saved. It doesn't help that the red lacquer paint oxidized to a rust brown color. :( - it makes it look much worse than it is. Also, I'm not going to mess around with fenders/hood and front doors. Those will just be replaced.

Still, there's no delusion here that this won't be a long haul. I wouldn't do this for any car though, and if it all goes to hell at least I'll have learned how to weld by then! :)
 
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Great to finally see a thread on this car, after talking to you for eight months about this thing! Glad I helped convince you to stay on your pursuit until you brought it home! This is absolutely a car that deserves a restoration if there ever was one!
 
This is the most rediculous and awesome restoration ever. Only bugeyed Alfas that rusty get restored.
 
awesome stuff there. I glad you are restoring this.

since you will be welding a lot, I love my hobart 140

please show more of the suspension stuff and the racing parts

and since you will have a lot of rust to deal with... try molasses rust removal - look it up on youtube stuff works great and can be pretty cheap compared to conventional ways
 
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That welder gets great reviews and I was actually leaning toward that or the Millermatic 140. The Hobart more affordable though, and 90% of my welding will be sheet metal so ...

I need to get some better pics of the suspension, but here are some photos of the center console gauges (ambient temp., volt, oil temp), the roll bar, and the 25mm+ front sway bar:




 
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