[Leica] Alfa rust

[lrzeitlin at gmail.com (Lawrence Zeitlin)]

I don't know much about the current Alfas but in the 1960?s, while
consulting to a Madison Avenue advertising company (now defunct), I was in a
sports car phase. Sequentially I owned a 1956 Jaguar 140MC, a Jaguar 3.4
Sedan (the type Chief Inspector Morse drove), and a 1959 Alfa Romeo Sprint
Veloce Coupe (probably the most beautiful car Bertone ever designed). My
bosses frowned on this adulation for foreign exotica and assigned me to be
research director of their new automobile account as a lesson. It was the
Edsel. I left the advertising business soon after and took up a different
kind of work.

The Alfa was a jewel. Not only was it beautiful but it was a real driver's
car. It had a DOHC  aluminum block engine fed by dual Weber DCOE 40mm carbs,
each cylinder having its own carb barrel. I enlarged the engine from its
stock 1300 cc to 1500 cc by replacing the wet liners and slightly stroking
the crankshaft. The car could easily cruise at 120 mph and held the curves
like it was on rails. Braking was handled by huge, sculpted aluminum drums
with shrunk in steel liners. It was the only car that I can truly say I
loved.

Unfortunately the materials and details of construction didn't match up to
the esthetics or performance. The metal of the engine block was so soft that
you could dent it with a thumbnail. Round bolt holes soon elongated to an
oval shape. Rust was a constant problem. The trunk mounted battery fed an
anemic Bosch starter through a 10 foot long cable. Winter starting was an
iffy affair unless you had the sense to park on a hill.

I learned to put up with the car's eccentricities and systematically
replaced all the Bosch electrics with either AC or Delco replacements. I
kept the car for 15 years until job and parenting responsibilities meant
that I couldn't put in the hour of maintenance that each hour of driving
demanded. The Alfa was beginning to show definite signs of wear. Besides it
attracted traffic tickets like files to honey.

I eventually gave the car away to a collector who promised to restore it and
give it a good home in a museum. I couldn't bear to sell it. I should have
kept it a few more decades because I saw a fully restored version on sale
for $100,000.

Here are a couple of pictures of my car, scanned from a 4 x 6 drugstore
prints. Of course these snaps cannot compare with Charlie Chan's great
pictures of Alfas.

Alfa in 1959, when new.

http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/Larry+Z/Alfa.jpg.html

Here is the car in 1975, waiting patiently outside my garage for needed
maintenance. You can see some paint flaking and incipient rust.

http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/Larry+Z/Alfa+2.jpg.html

Finally, here is the Alfa's replacement, a Chevrolet Vega. It served
adequately as a family car but began to rust in the showroom.

http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/Larry+Z/Vega+_75.jpg.html


Larry Z