Alfa Romeo Forums banner

Pics of a Duetto racer buildup

197K views 809 replies 75 participants last post by  Alfar7 
#1 · (Edited)
Whew, I've been waiting a long time to start a thread like this. Though I'm not done, I've made enough progress to start the exhibition.

Okay, technically it's not a Duetto, but a '69 1750 Spider Veloce. I'm calling it a Duetto from here on out for convenience.

I bought this car 2.5 years ago locally from a lead off this site. I was looking for a wreck to rescue. This fit the bill almost perfectly: Banged up body, rusty floors, already stripped, and an unoriginal seized engine. It had most of it's ratty and moldy interior bits in boxes.

More importantly, it's a '69, which to me is the most desirable year Alfa we can run in our particular vintage race organization here in the Pacific Northwest.

If these pics upload properly, you'll see the car as I first saw it:
 

Attachments

See less See more
2
#135 ·
Good guess, Neil. But this is an Eye-talian car, so it gets Eye-talian mirrors. Vittalonis.

Maybe someday I'll pony up the $175 for a Spa mirror that you see on a lot of the open cars. But jeez, it's just a mirror on a stick. Mine's at least drilled for lightness, and has the cool periscope look. I'll mount it up later today, though I hope I won't have to use it much in the future.
 

Attachments

#136 ·
Great thread,

Love to see guys building their own race cars from the ground up. One thing that may have helped you ( never too late ) is a blind nut applicator foe brackets and mounting any number of items. I don't have a picture of one but the application is simple. You can get blind nuts in both metyeric and std sizes. All you have to do then, is drill a hole fit the nut in place and the tool spreads it out and voila, you have a captive nut held sercurley in place to mount any item. These will handle a fair amount of load. I have used them for my 69 Spitfire, a 73 911, a 81 BMW 325 and a Datsun 510, all race cars. They were clean and really easy to do.


Great car as I am restoring my own 1969 Spider Veloce. Good luck in the upcoming season.

Rick Stephenson
 
#137 · (Edited)
Hi Rick, sounds like you're talking about Rivnuts. I looked into those a while back during the main build, but didn't want to spend the bucks for the tooling. I may get outfitted with them in future rebuilds after the dust settles. They are a indeed a slick way to go.

I wired in the electric fan, finally. It's a 12" Spal low profile puller. It barely fits the radiator, and there's maybe less than a quarter inch clearance from the crank pulley. That's after I removed the upper radiator rubber bushings for extra clearance. I have the fan wired in to the original heater blower switch which I mounted on the dash. I plan to use the fan on demand, mainly when I'm stuck in pregrid with the engine idling.

I still have an oil cooler to mount, and some suspension tweeks to make, and some other odds and ends, but I feel like I've addressed the major issues that I uncovered from the last track session. The next session in 3 weeks will reveal more, I'm sure.
 

Attachments

#138 ·
Another angle of the dash, 'cause this fan switch pleases me so. I left room above it for future switches, whatever they may be (machine guns, oil slick, turbo boost, etc.):
 

Attachments

#140 ·
-AN fittings and braided stainless hose

Okay, back to the car. I've got list of things to complete in the off-season before renewing my race license and getting into the action.

First, the track sessions reinforced that the engine runs warm. The electric fan worked well in staving off high temps in pregrid, but I need to shed more heat when the car is at speed. To that end, I have an oil cooler to install. I'll use this opportunity to upgrade the remote filter's hose-clamped 1/2" rubber oil lines with the fancy braided stainless reinforced -10AN hose and -AN fittings.

Here's a show and tell of how to fit them:

First, I cut the hose with a cut-off wheel on my Dremel. The tape prevents fraying of the stainless braid. Need a clean cut to slip the hose end into the fitting's collar. Another method would be to chop the hose with a mason's chisel and a 5lb sledge. No kidding.
 

Attachments

#141 ·
Here's what a -10 AN fitting looks like. Also referred to as Aeroquip fittings, the same way generic facial tissue is called Kleenex. The blue insert is the equivalent of a hose barb, so you can see that it will compress the hose against the collar for a tight fit once everything is screwed down.

The red collar will slip over the hose end. It's a tight, threaded fit that doesn't go easily without a little WD-40. It needs to advance all the way to ensure a tightly compressed fit for the blue nipple portion.

I painted a red line around the hose just under the collar to indicate its correct fully seated position. If the hose backs out of the collar during installation of the blue part, or during regular usage, I'll be able to tell. Otherwise, the collar obscures the gap between a loose hose and it's male insert.

The blue section is threaded on (again with some WD-40) and compresses the hose from the inside against the outer red collar. Once it's screwed down all the way, and you have a tight, leakproof, reusable hose attachment.
 

Attachments

#142 ·
Since I enjoy beating dead horses, here's a couple pics showing the superiority of these -AN fittings (at about 10X the cost). The two hoses look similar at a glance in the first pic. They both fit into a 1/2" NPT hole. But check out the business ends of the 1/2" hose barb compared to the -10 AN fitting. The 1/2" barb has a 3/8" orifice, while the -10 has a 1/2" orifice. Exciting!
 

Attachments

#143 ·
Happy Halloween!

Just completed another small project in between Trick-or-Treaters. In the process of tidying up the engine bay, I wanted a better route for the crankcase vent hose.

Previously, I used the stock vent as shown. It resulted in looping the hose around the engine to reach the catch can on the firewall. Since I'm not about to drop a couple hundred bucks on a vented reproduction GTA oil cap, I modified the stock vent. I cut the tube at 45 degrees, rotated the stub, and welded it into an "L." Painted, installed, bam; instant sano. Now the hose runs along the intake manifold instead of outside the carbs. Mmm, it's these little details that please me.
 

Attachments

#144 ·
You have the cam cover bolts of the early 1600's, but a later 2L-injection cam cover. The early cam cover vent that was original with the Duetto 1600 was oriented in the direction you've created; it went straight back in a large tube that fed into the carb plenum cover.

Robert
 
#145 ·
Well, Robert, my proper Duetto 1600 valve cover with it's correctly oriented vent tube is either:

1. Sitting in a landfill in Akron, OH
2. Recycled into aluminum siding for a trailer home in Gainesville, FL
3. Serving as a planter for oregano in a hippie's commune outside Eugene, OR
or more likely,
4. The crowning piece of my future racing nemesis's 2L cheater engine

No matter what, this isn't the first, nor the last time that I reinvent the wheel on this project. I have a low threshold for doing so, as I enjoy the tinkering process.
 
#149 · (Edited)
Ideally the vent really needs to be on the other side of the camcover...
I'm not so sure. The timing chain rotates from the intermediate gear to the exhaust cam; it tends to carry a lot of oil, and might sling too much into the vent. Murray gets a lot of oil in his oilcatch tank from having both EX and IN cams with VVT mechanisms; these require cutting thru the vent carryover pipe that is on the inside of the cam cover across the front.

Robert
 
#148 ·
Thanks Robert, I hope my reply didn't come off as feisty. I'm just having fun. And yes Pete, the other side would be a better location. I do have alloy welding equipment, and I do like to tinker, but that would be going too far.

Next up, radiator shrouding. My street Spider has some weatherstripping between the radiator and sheet metal, but the racer is missing those bits. So I made my own (again).

So I went back to my stockpile of ex-Boeing aluminum sheet (bought from their surplus store before it shut down a few years ago) to bend up a radiator shroud. Yes, this is the same metal you'll find 35,000 feet up in the stratosphere. First pic is the unshrouded gap. What I didn't photograph is the sloppy job of sealing the smaller gaps with aluminum tape. Now I can move on to the oil cooler.
 

Attachments

#151 ·
Hi Simon. Start mentioning CB160s and I'm likely to bore our viewers with a drawn-out tangent on vintage racebikes. I can't resist, so I'll keep it short:

To answer your question, I've raced the crap out of them (I have 3). The Gulf Blue CB160 is mostly stock, and I use it for our LeMans start exhibition races. I have a red/white 175 as my goto racebike for local races, and another red/white 175 frankenbike bored out to a cheater 250cc for the Portland 5V and AHRMA 250 GP classes. The 250 looks nearly identical to the 175, so I won't waste space picturing it.

Been to the Bonneville GP outside SLC (took 4th in 250 GP), Portland a few times, and of course my home track of Pacific Raceways outside Seattle. Got 3rd overall for the season. Great times, and it's the distraction that keeps me from this car project for weeks at a time.
 

Attachments

#153 ·
Not much to update, project is stalled while I wait on more -AN fittings to plumb in the oil cooler. Also mulling over options for the fuel cell and fire system. In the meantime, I'm playing with my spool gun for welding aluminum. I'll need the practice before I fab up a fuel cell container.

So, I remade the center mirror mount in aluminum from some of that same scrap Boeing aluminum. I bought enough of the stuff to build a small plane of my own. Anyway, I raised the mount's height a bit and built in a little angle for better viewing. Once again, it's drilled for lightness. Converting the center mirror mount to alloy, I'm reducing weight from a high spot on the car, thereby lowering the center of gravity in addition to "adding lightness". What's better than that? Pete, this one's for you:
 

Attachments

#155 ·
Simon, I think any decent machine shop will bore out your cylinders to whatever you request. Find out who'd doing the local race car or bike engine rebores, there's usually at least a couple go-to guys who do that stuff. The guy we use up here around Seattle for the Hondas is Morrie, the Wheelmaster
 
#156 · (Edited)
Back on topic...

I've been inundated with emails asking what I was planning for a fuel sample port and how it would be installed. Okay, not really. Zero emails about that.

But since I have to put one in anyway, I thought I'd shoot a pic. This sampling port is a tube in the form of a spring-loaded plunger with a couple of viton seals. It's just something to satisfy the rules book and scrutineering process should I choose to race outside of a vintage organization. In the several years that I raced a Spec Miata, no one ever tested the fuel in impound.

Oh, the chrome knob is the fuel pressure regulator.
 

Attachments

#158 ·
Wedgie, the spool gun attaches to a Lincoln Electric MIG welder and requires pure Argon to weld aluminum. It's the best $200 I've spent on tools in a while. Here's why:

Remember the angled crankcase vent I fabbed a few posts ago? Well, in the interest of reinventing the wheel yet again, I decided to re-make it out of alloy. You know, to save that extra couple grams from high up on the engine.

Here's some self-explanatory pics. Notice that I'm an awful welder, but make up for it with copious grinding. These bits would look better if my Dremel wouldn't have burned up the other day. And once again, there's the recurring glass of a cheap cab, which was supplemented with aluminum filings by the end of the project.
 

Attachments

#159 ·
And the final install. It's the next best thing to the GTA vented cap. This should do until I have a TIG welder. Then I'll remake it out of Ti. Or not. Next up will be oil cooler shenanigans.
 

Attachments

This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top