Category: Alfa Romeo
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One Day in the Shop: a Trio of Alfa Romeo Straight Eights
The shop on Paradise Drive was one of the few places in America where you might find more than one pre-war Alfa Romeo supercar on the same day. Phil Reilly & Co was a specialist in the cars Vittorio Janos designed for Alfa and in today’s image from June 24, 2008, we see the 8C…
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One Day in the Shop… August 12, 2009
The Alfa Romeo TZ2 restoration was finished on this day, a few days after my 40th birthday. This team portrait includes, from left to right, Tom Smith, Ivan Zaremba, me, Chuck Mathewson and Rolly Boorman. Others worked to complete this project too; I think Phil Reilly & Co had around 12 or 13 employees at…
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A Busy March in Norcal
It is a beautiful sunny spring day outside here in northern California, and I need to get out there. So far in 2024, I’ve worked in the shop five days a week and been chained to the computer most weekends. Here’s a few images from the past couple of months… The Alfa Romeo 2500 SS…
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One Day in the Shop…September 20, 2013
A new and recurring post topic: What was going on in the shop that day? Here’s the concept: I pick an image from the archive. It will be an image of some cars that were in the shop at Phil Reilly & Co between 2005-2015, hopefully some interesting cars, and I will write about what…
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Keeping the Fire Inside the Motor
I’ve worked on a pretty wide variety of cars over the years, and a consistent engineering question each of the designers faced is this: How do we keep the extremely high combustion pressures inside of the motor? If you’ve ever experienced a blown head gasket and the expense that comes with repairing it properly, you…
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An Alfa Romeo 8C Project
A post about classic cars! Travelingwithtools has been focused on the travel part of late, so I thought it was time for a tools post. This Alfa Romeo 8C 2300 came to me in 2008 with a badly leaking rear main seal. As I recall, it was a very fresh restoration but there had been…
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A Bad Day of Fly Fishing is Better Than…
I spent Tuesday afternoon on the Firehole river in Yellowstone National Park. It was reputed to be “on fire” (yuk yuk) by the West Yellowstone fly shops, and I’ve long wanted to fish the stretch where geysers are steaming away stream-side. I walked and waded for about five hours, but the afternoon started with me…