About ten years ago, while working at Reilly’s old shop in Corte Madera, I had my hands in a particularly interesting 1930 Bugatti Type 35B. This post started off as an attempt to craft a recurring theme along the lines of “On this Day in History”, but I haven’t quite sorted out the format yet.
In the process of searching my photos by date, I came across these images of a new mirror mount being made in February 2013. It was one of the few pieces that had gone missing from this very original car during its time hidden away.
The short history is that the car was last used at a race at Pau, France in 1930, then lost to history until 2006. It came to Reilly’s to be sympathetically recommissioned… not restored, mind you, but made to run and drive properly, while retaining as much of the original patina as possible.
Zeke Prince and David Wallace did the majority of the work on this car, if I recall correctly, but I was assigned a few tasks along the way. In the end, I filled in to reassemble the engine and I’m very sad to say that I’ve lost the photos from that part of the project.
I did retain, however, this short series of a new mount being fabricated for the rear view mirror. I think the glass came from the Bugatti Club in the UK, and I copied the mount layout from another car that was in the shop. How does one fold sheet metal around a piece of beveled glass, you may ask? With some anxiety!
I recall that the material was something like 3030 aluminum about 60 thou thick, and quite easy to form, but still! I somehow managed to get the glass secured in the bent tabs, and lost no blood in the process.
The car lives now at the Revs Institute in Naples, Florida. Click any of the images below for larger versions in a gallery with captions.
Here’s a look around the cockpit, courtesy of the Revs Institute and Three Sixty Tours.
And here is a link to the car’s page on the Revs website…
TRAVELINGWITHTOOLS 
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