Category: Engines
-
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…
-
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,…
-
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…
-
Shims Suck, Let Me Tell You Why
Back in 2010, I built what was rare for me in my later career, an American-made engine. The Lincoln KB V-12, circa 1932, was a big cast iron monster, very different from the mostly French and Italian motors I’d been working on in that era at Phil Reilly & Company. This story isn’t about the…
-
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…
-
A Lamborghini Double Check
I worked on this Lamborghini 400GT project back in Colorado several years ago. The car had been stored without the correct mix in the cooling system and the crankcase was broken by the expanding ice. A new old stock crankcase was somehow tracked down, and I was charged with transferring all of the components into…
-
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,…
-
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…
-
Back to the Birdcage
For the last three years, I’ve mostly been working on more modern race cars, but back in the day, I worked on several Maserati Tipo 61 “Birdcages”. I had my hands in four or five of the lightweight masterpieces and came to know them pretty intimately. I’m back in NorCal for a bit to do…
-
The Talbot Lago Finally Makes it to Pebble Beach
I started working on this project back in 2016 in Colorado, the beginning of a long and circuitous path. In a previous post, I explained some of the issues that helped make it a five year engine build… One of the few upsides of a worldwide pandemic is that some events get postponed, which gave…
TRAVELINGWITHTOOLS 