It’s been a while since my last post. My workaday work picked up somewhat and time for the Sprint became harder to come by. It doesn’t help at all that it’s now getting dark around 5.

In any case, I’ll start with the good news: the Sprint is now parked in my driveway, i.e., at home and not in a warehouse in San Leandro. I wish I could say I drove it home myself but the truth is that I had to use my AAA card again. (I have two of my four yearly-allotted tows left. I don’t remember the last year I didn’t need and use all four tows. Bring a Trailer? Nah.)

Tow truck #1. I requested a flatbed but this guy showed up. While I was waiting for him I reinstalled the passenger side door panel. He tried to fit the Sprint onto his lifter thing and it was too narrow (which is to say, too old and too far removed from a Honda Accord). Four hours later, a flatbed finished the job.

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If you have ever replaced the shoes on a three-shoe system such as Alfa decided to produce on its interim 101 / 1600 cars, I feel your pain. Changing out brake shoes isn’t nearly as much fun as it sounds, and to most intelligent people it sounds like a pain in the arsenal. You are alternately fighting with springs, visibility, and the general slipperiness of things that are supposed to be slippery in operation, but which you wish were oh-so-grippy on installation.

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My car scene right now is a little like an act on the Ed Sullivan show, where a guy spins a dozen or so plates at once and everyone is amazed. Of course that guy has talent whereas I have a combination of trial-and-error know-how, persistence, and a few spare dollars to throw at problems that are either too boring or too time consuming for me to address.

To wit… The TI got painted (yay!) and I am reasonably happy with the results. I have to remind myself that the price was right. There is a lot of orange peel and the coverage isnt’ perfect, but I’m sure a good wet sand and polish will do wonders for it.

Outside the body shop, the day after it was painted.

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I could have titled this post about the ‘62 (or whatever) Sprint with some allusion to the devil-in-the-details or Kafka-esque navigation of impossible escape, but I’m trying to stay optimistically realistic, and not fall victim to the paralysis that sets in when you’re really, truly overwhelmed. The fact is, progress has been made: some thanks to the not-so-mighty dollar, some to elbow grease. The car is close enough to being drivable that I’m starting to browse catalogs for suitably attractive passengers.

(I’m kidding, of course. Sort of.)

Anyway, here’s a little run-down of the dollars being spent:

• Bay City Alternators (International at 89th Ave in Oakland, 510-633-1512), fixing the generator which wasn’t generating, and painting it shiny black, to boot. $60.
• Jesus Angulo (same location and number as above — god bless International Blvd), fixing and reupholstering the front seats. $300 the pair.
• Berkeley Radiator Works (San Pablo at Pardee in Berkeley, 510-845-3151), boiling out the gas tank and addressing any rust. $300 estimate, hopefully less….
• Brake Materials & Parts (Fort Wayne,  Indiana, 260-426-3331), relining all six front shoes at $24 per shoe. I curse the Trinacria, not the price per shoe. These are good, Ferodo linings so the dollars are buying something of proven quality.

As for the elbow grease, I’ve more or less fixed the passenger side window, which had fallen off its tracks and no longer went up or down, and got the headlights and turn signals to work. More importantly, I got the worst of the wheel cylinders apart and honed, ready for a rebuild kit from Jon Norman / Alfa Parts in Berkeley.

Nothing relevant here at all, just a mediocre photo of one of the pretty sunsets we've been getting here in the Bay Area, along with my Giulia Super.

In other news, the TI is actually about to get painted. I saw the color today and was pretty happy with it. More on that next time, hopefully with pictures of the final product.