Category: Car Restoration
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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: 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: June 17, 2009
Today’s image, a Cisitalia D46 in front of an Alfa TZ2, with tons of talent all around. This image features a large chunk of the top talent that was in place on Paradise Drive in 2009, and strikes me as appropriate timing, because I’m currently finishing up some work on an Abarth… a car from…
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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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One Day in the Shop: May 25, 2012
Two Hispanos, a Bugatti and a U-16 Miller… A typical day at Phil Reilly & Co, on Paradise Drive in Corte Madera, California. The variety of projects under way at any given point in time was remarkable, with this snapshot in time featuring four pre-war powerplants and a hint of the future in the back,…
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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… 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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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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A Ferrari 166 Under the Knife
Ferraris seem to be all the rage lately, what with the recent film generating headlines. I haven’t seen it yet and probably won’t for some time, as movies about cars and racing have almost always been a vast disappointment. What a letdown “Rush” was, after all the hype. The racing scenes were just as bad…
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