chaos theory…

One of my favorite subjects in college was Newtonian mechanics. It seemed so neat and tidy, and such a good explanation of how and why things happen the way they do. I remember being so totally enthralled learning the “rules” of the natural world, ruminating on Causality the natural world, and how clever and exciting to apply these laws to produce predictable results. In fact, I felt a deep sense of purpose that it was my position in life to develop technologies that applied these principles and to exploit the laws to benefit mankind. Press on lever A and enjoy the engineered affect at point B. Nice, tidy, effective, useful, and predictable.

What a shock it was, to then go on to study Quantum mechanics. Finding that in fact the world was subject to statistical anomalies.  That while things were mostly predictable, underlying everything was a sort of chaos, an uncertainty, that could rear its head at any moment. While loosening up the notion of rigorous and complete Causality was initially a shock, the complexity and wonder of Quantum mechanics had is own beauty. The world is a big, beautiful, and immensely complicated place.

I imagine that when Alfa engineers designed the 1964  Giulietta spider, they too were acting as engineers upon notions of Causality.  Insert bearing into front hub A, insert hub to shaft B. Hub A rotates freely on shaft B and customer is benefited by means of transportation. A nice and tidy application of physics for the benefit of mankind.

Or possibly if something unplanned were to happen to the car down the road they provided solutions and directions for those contingencies as well : to service strut P, Remove nut C with spanner, apply grease, and torque  to 5 N-m upon re-assembly.

What they couldn’t have ever imagined would ever happen was that I would try to repair such a beast after having it sit untended for such a long exposure to entropy and neglect. Nature has its way with things, especially when you aren’t looking, or when you allow enough time to pass. What once would have been considered a statistical aberration tips over to absolute certainty.

What then were the perturbations from the initial conditions and series of sucessive events, the causes if you will, that led to the effects that I have been dealing with for the last few months?

My experience with the machine has been more along these lines: Apply spanner to remove bolt B from nut A, Hrrm Jammed.

Apply penetrating oil and go wrestle with some other stuck component.

Return and apply heat. Jammed.

Apply penetrating oil, return after 20 minutes of trying to salvage rusty fasteners by cleaning them with the wire wheel. Apply impact wrench to bolt B… Nothing.. curse profusely. now apply sawzall and make note to buy beg or borrow special metric fasteners.

It has been this way for EVERYTHING. Thankfully I have a great support group of car nuts and my friends and family all accept me and look the other way as I try to sort through the never ending tangle of crusty parts that I’m calling my Giulietta!

It’s this type of thing that kept me from driving the Giulietta on the Motherlode400 rally, and in all honesty, given the rate of repairs there are several hundred more man hours left before I’m really going to be out and about enjoying the car.

Heres a little list of the hurdles that I have thus been able to put behind me:

• Removed the stuck passenger drum! After about 2 weeks of pulling on it and heating it with the torch, I finally just removed the whole assembly and took it to Jaans workshop where he attempted to pull it, then we resorted to trying to cut the bearing race with the oxy torch! Still nothing!Finally I ended up sourcing a replacement! Lots of time for what ended up being a totally seized bearing race on the spindle.
  

  Get OFF of there! dag-nabbit.

• Each hub got new bearings.
  

  Ready for a re-fresh!

  

  hubba hubba!

• Each brake cylinder, and the master cyl, were disassembled, polished the bores, and rebuilt with new seals.
  

  gooey mess that permiated the entire brake system. reminds me of the sewage monster: http://boingboing.net/2009/07/06/north-carolina-sewer.htmlCrusty mess of guts

  

  That's better!

  

  ready for use

• Shoes were sent to Porterfeild racing for resurfacing, came back and the front ones were too thick causing the drum not to fit..  they are now on their way back for a trim (at no cost to me thanks to the fine folks at Porterfield).
  

  Shoe repair..

  

  daddy got a new set of shoes!

• Front suspension pieces were all cleaned with the wire brush, stamped steel pieces painted in black epoxy, cast pieces got a layer of clear-coat resin (kinda snotty looking when dried but I started down the path and I’m not turning back now).
  

  This is AFTER pressure washing

  

  going back togehter after a serious round of scrub

• Brake lines all had goo plugging them up, so I tried to clear with a wire and compressed air, some of them were obviously not going to return to service so I ordered some new cunifer brake line material from Fedhill, salvaged the fittings and borrowed a flaring tool to replicate the lines.. I have heard that some people make drawings to bend their lines to but I had good success by incrementally supporting the line with the vice and bending the new line to match, securing it all as I went with zip ties. The zip ties were key here and made the new lines easy to match.
  

  Spanky new Cunifer lines bent and tied to match the dirty old ones in a twisted game of S&M.

• I spent a day just detailing things under the hood, all the grommets and straps and baubles.
  

  totally frustrated cleaning of grommets/escutcheon

• One day completely frustrated with the whole project, I just made a license plate and fog light mount out of the front bumper bracket.
  

  ratty racer bucket bling

• FERGATS! uuugh. My car came with maybe 3 usable wheels. most of the wheels had a TERRIBLE wobble to them. So I searched for a replacement set and found that Giulietta steelies are actually pretty hard to find. After uncovering a set I gleefully brought them to the sandblaster only to find afterward that they too were bent and one had been rotting and repaired with some bondo/JB weld.  Let me delve a little deeper here as I hope others can learn from this whole mess. The Fergats aren’t really robust around the mounting flange, in fact they’re pretty tinny. What I believe is happening is that they are bending when they are mounted in the hydraulic tire machines. Some of these machines hold the tire centrally with a cone shaped arbor, and then apply hydraulic pressure to the outer edge of the rim to break the tire bead. This is an enormous force and I believe it tweaks the whole rim at the mounting face. I now have seen 7 of 8 rims with this kind of wobble in it. To fix this, mount the rim on the wheel and spin it (if your wheel bearings are free), Mark the high-spot. Take it to the hydraulic press and press down the high-spots.  Return to the car, and repeat until the wheel spins true.  Stockton Wheel company can perform this service too. using the same procedure but with a dial indicator to quantify the high-spots.
  

  trying to make the best from a bad wheel, this one got tossed.

• I had hoped that my shocks would have been rebuild-able but they were all sealed, so I ordered a set of Konis.
• I mounted everything up front nice and tidy and all cleaned and rebuilt. using long threaded rods in the spring pans to decompress the front springs..
  

  This is a photo of the springs coming out with the treaded rod method. I couldnt find a good one of them going back in, but its the same way.. you replace two of the spring pan bolts with long threaded rods and slowly release the tension on the spring by incrementally loosening the rods.

• Having spent months sorting through the front end of the car Its now getting down the the really nasty stuff. the stuff I’ve been dreading and avoiding, but knowing that I’d have to deal with the whole time I owned the car… the rust. I feel like nothing could be harder or more laborious than what I’ve dealt with so far, but I know that the worst is yet to come.

If I had to sum up the whole experience so far with an analogy, I guess I would say that so far rebuilding the Giulietta is like running into a burning pet store, its difficult, its scary, its worse than you imagined, but you feel obligated to rescue things no matter how repulsive they are. And in the end, you gotta deal with the snakes too. well, its kind of like this:

I guess I feel pretty good about it all, I’m finally pretty happy with the way the front end is coming together. Though the whole experience has been a LOT more work than I had expected.  It is all coming together nice and tidy, and I think I’ll value owning/driving the car more having done the full Monty.

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