Category: Bugatti
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A Bugatti Cylinder Block Repair
Working With Iron and a Cautionary Tale Several years ago, I went through a Type 40 Bugatti engine that had had a hard life. Its recent days hadn’t been made any easier by the chap that took it apart, using a dead blow hammer to break free the joint between the cylinder block and the…
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One Day in the Shop: September 20, 2013
Three Big Bugattis and a Little Peugeot Every day at Phil Reilly & Co was something special, some days more so than others. This day was probably just another average one, though a search of the archive contains over 600 photos from that month in 2013, so it could go either way. Two of these…
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One Day in the Shop… June 2, 2010
A post-war Jaguar, a brass-era Isotta-Fraschini and a pre-war Bugatti Type 35B. Man, what a place to work. I remember when I first got the job, I couldn’t really get my head around the way that the guys working there were used to it. The types of cars that came in and out, day after…
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Bugatti Blocks Balderdash!
Ettore Bugatti came from a family of artists, though he was not himself formally trained as one. He apprenticed at a bicycle manufacturer and began making cars without any engineering education. There are many remarkable artistic details that resulted from this unconventional origin story. One example of Bugatti’s eye for detail are the lovely polished…
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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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New Parts for Old Bugattis
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.…
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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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A Bugatti Crankshaft… Artistry and Madness
Bugatti Type 35 Grand Prix engines are well known for their complex roller bearing crankshafts, built up from hundreds of components, a design intended to reduce friction losses and to be able to survive on very little oil at very high RPM. 7,000 revs in 1924 was earth shattering. And as far as I know,…
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What’s it Take to Make an Old Bugatti Run Properly?
A Deep Dive into Some Pre-War French Machinery I spent a fair amount of time earlier this year getting a 1926 Bugatti Type 30 ready to do some road miles. It had been in a private collection for many years and apparently saw very little use. The new owner enjoys using his cars, so right…
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A Note From the Desert
I’ve been parked out in the Nevada desert for a few days now, since finishing my look-back series on our trip to Africa in 2016. I’ve been poking through my photo archives and infrequent journal entries, looking for the path forward for the blog. I have a pretty good idea what I want to do,…
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