Ferrari Mailing List: Re: Friendship and the List

[Doug and Terri Anderson (dnt]

Ain’t this a great group or what?

 

DOUG

 

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From: Grahame Reinthal [mailto:grahame [at] reinthal.com.au]
Sent: Monday, May 28, 2012 7:51 PM
To: DOUG
Cc: 'Gerry Duyvestyn'; The FerrariList
Subject: [Ferrari] Friendship and the List

 

It was my pleasure recently to meet Phil T. here in Sydney and spend some time with him.  Then Phil's good internet buddy, Clyde, also turned up in Sydney at the same time so I picked them both up one day and they met in person for the very first time - quite funny. Turns out that Clyde is real and, refreshingly, just like his emails!

 

We spent an afternoon together trekking around doing Ferrari stuff. Phil and I first went to Cavallino Motorsport, a great Ferrari engineering shop run by Miles Sandy and Russell Reeves, who did my 328 conversion of the 308gt4, including EFI and MoTec and other stuff, plus the 360 brake conversion on the same car so it pulls up fantastically. We then picked up Clyde from his hotel and met up with Gerry Duyvestyn (long time Ferrari guy, former club president and so on) who is a mad car nutter with a beautiful 330 and about 30 project cars including Indy cars, Lambos, Ferraris and in particular an 840 horsepower twin supercharged v12 Ferrari/Ford T-bucket - you have to see it to believe it.  Gerry's business manufactures and provides lots of unobtanium parts for older Ferraris, from about the 355 back, including windscreens (even for Testarossas - Clyde was quite excited about this) and all sorts of things, and he is also behind Mille Miglia exhausts, the anti-oil surge sumps for 308s, etcetera.  We had a great afternoon together and then I dropped them both back to their respective digs.

 

Anyway, inspired by all this, I took the 328gt4 out for a run over the week-end after a long time of enforced dormancy (my back has been so bad I physically could not get into the car).  It drove really well but when it came time to turn on the lights (after 20 years of my ownership), it has suddenly developed the stupid, flappy, blinky headlight syndrome!  It does not seem to be a mechanical cam and rod problem - seems to be purely electrical because it does different things each time I try to operate the lights. One will go up, then down, then both will go up, then down, then both won't go up at all, then both might go up, but straight back down again. The net result - no lights.  I suspect either the relays or more likely dust or corrosion of the switch gear in the steering column. Any of you had this issue?  Oh well, life is a journey, not a destination. And it's an old Ferrari, after all, so what can you expect?  But it is certainly not yet ready for Clyde's ghetto solution.

 

Cheers,

 

Grahame