After a hiatus of a few weeks, I spent some time on the TI today and made some progress. Rust and general neglect are my regular foes; it seems I can’t look under a panel or wiggle a part that doesn’t suddenly ask me to pay attention to it, so even the most basic goals have grown more difficult to achieve.

I’m also succumbing to good old fashioned mission creep. Once you start tearing into a given area, it becomes more and more a fool’s economy to leave what’s already half-assed or non-functional as such. A couple of examples: seats and door panels, heater, gauge cluster. As of right now the only things I haven’t removed from the interior of the TI are the shifter knob and steering wheel.

The heater developed a leak a few months back and has been bypassed. On the cluster, the speedometer is broken, the oil pressure gauge doesn’t work, and everything else is temperamental at best. The TI gauge cluster was something of a departure from standard Alfa gauges so it’s kind of interesting to tear into one and see how they work. The speedometer looks suspiciously like typewriter ribbon:

The heater was only half-there in the first place — it was missing the lower half (the part with the fan). I sourced a more or less complete unit at APE swap meet last year, and am just now getting around to fixing it all up to make one good heater. Removing the dash obviously forced my hand on this project, but it’s an easy job, mostly just a matter of disassembly, cleanup, paint and reassembly. More or less final product here:

So, on to the good news. The floors are all but done. I still need to do some cleanup and welding on the bottom sides — more for due diligence than anything else. I also have to get the jacking points back on. After all that comes a healthy dose of POR-15 and primer, seam sealer, and some kind of insulating something for heat and noise.

Now for some fun stuff – I took the seats and door panels to Jesus Angulo (behind Bay City Alternators on International at 88th ave or so). He did a nice job, at a reasonable price. Once I saw the seats I realized I had upped the ante on the whole project. I’m not sure what this will mean but I don’t think this car will be ratty for long.

And the rears:

That’s about it for now. Other than finishing the floors, I need to refurbish the heater, fix the gauge cluster, and repaint the dash. More on those jobs in some future post.

Posted Saturday, July 18th, 2009 at 4:01 pm. Filed under 1966 Giulia TI, Alfa Romeo, Body Work. Follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or Trackback from your own site.