Re: Welcome to Alf & His Factory Restored 400GT 2+2!

Hi Alf, I didn"t know you bought the car in 1982, that"s when I bought mine. So you must have a lot of experience with "local shops." What I found in my case was that the car was not at all as advertised.They said "excellent" while in fact, it was poor, maybe fair.But I bought it anyway, as the timing was right for me. I am continuing -- to this day I believe -- to find things that were done incorrectly by "local shops."It"s hard to tell whether these mistakes were made by the local shops, or whether the factory made them to begin with.But they are so obvious that I believe they were made by "local shops" after the car left the factory. One example.There are thrust washers that ride in-between the rear "hub housing" and the lower control arms.In this picture: RN-00119 They have a little hole for a location dowel. Point is, there is also a centering ring, (I believe RN-01554, though it looks much smaller) which keeps the thrust washer centered.These centering rings are missing on the driver"s side of my car!Though it"s possible that they were left out at the factory, I have to think (based on all the other "local shop" work I"ve fixed over the years) that they were simply accidently left out during a local shop servicing.(BTW, I know what shop serviced the car, I"ll check to see if they are still around...) My solution, over the years, has been to do all the work myself.If I could afford it, I might have taken the car to Al Burtoni, who is not too far away.But that is out of my budget, so I do the work myself. What I"ve found (and you"ll hear a lot more about this in the coming weeks and months) is that there is simply no documentation on our cars.None was ever written, and little has been written since.So the bulk of the "correct" information out there is in the minds of the very top local shops, such as Al Burtoni, where he studied at the factory and has the experience of working on dozens and dozens of these older cars. If you take the car to a local shop and they don"t have experience with your exact model, and I mean a lot of experience -- forget it. There isn"t enough time in the day for them to do the research needed to do the job properly. This is a long-winded way of saying...I can understand why you took your car to the factory!It"s bad enough here, I can only imagine how difficult it must be in Norway. All the best, and thanks so much for sharing all this information with us. Fred