A Special Christmas Card

Lucas from www.scarfonephoto.com sent us a nice Christmas card this year with a photograph of 01464 shot the day before we began the restoration. It was a nice gesture and a welcome reminder to wish all of our blog visitors a safe and prosperous holiday season.

A Masterpiece is Launched: The Dino Compendium

In previous posts you will have read of Dino 'Guru' Matthias offering up wisdom towards our restoration. Indeed Matthias Bartz from Germany is rightfully regarded as the worlds authority on the subject. It is with great pleasure that we announce the launch of his book which stands as the definitive source on all things Dino. Now everyone can have access to amounts of information never before available.

These projects are always a labour of love and we thank you Matthias for taking the time to share your research in print.

Copies can be ordered from www.dino-book.com

Photo credits: Marcel Massini

The doubters will fade but the mousehair won't. HVL dash material put to the test

When it came time to upholstering the dash we took the leap of faith (and followed the impeccable reputation of Henk at HVL Interiors) and covered it in his new reproduction mousehair. As outlined in an older post this material is a perfect reproduction to original with the advantage that it does not fade quickly in the sun the way the OEM material did.

A close friend of ours was more skeptical so he decided to put the material to the test. What better than on the dash of his pickup truck where he parked a piece of dash material for almost 3 months. Summer has been kind in Canada this year so it was exposed to sunlight for some 12-14 hours per day amplified by the effects of the windshield.

Today, upon inspection, the material was found to have not faded at all even after this less than scientific test of durability. Needless to say our friend is a believer and has decided to use it on his own car.

NOS Headlights may be a long lost re-union

NOS headlights were sourced from a gentleman in France and they will replace the tired units to come off of 01464. Upon opening the package we discovered original installation instructions and quality control tags dated February 1970. Now this may be a stretch but it is not outside the realm of possibility that these lights were manufactured in the same batch that was supplied to Ferrari when our Dino was made. Carello did not produce a lot of lights and this particular model has a fairly narrow application range so we may have just sourced the sibling light to those originally fitted to our car. Regardless it was a cool find and a very authentic addition to our restoration.

A little help from Sweden. The fuse panel is made

As so many stories begin with 01464 'At some time in the life of our car....the fuse panel was changed' In this case it was changed to a later North American spec fuse panel leaving us to make a new one from scratch .

The first step was to get phenolic board. This was achieved by the generosity of fellow car collector Randy P. and his company Paisley Products of Canada who supplied us with material. This was an easy request for Randy but he made sure to pull out some real old stock from the early 70's to make our panel totally authentic.

The next step was to measure an original panel and make a drawing. This is when some old IKEA furniture (thus the Swede influence) was sacrificed to make a jig that would hold the material while being placed in our milling machine. Material was cut to size and then covered in a self adhesive paper (used by sign makers to pre-mask decals) so that we could draw visible guide lines on. Of course measurements were checked many times and finally we got cutting.

The final result is nothing short of perfect. We are really pleased and look forward to building up the whole fuse panel just as soon as we re-plate all the mounting screws and relays.

Now for some pics.