Category: Cars
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Teenage Dumb Stuff With Cars
When I was a young kid, I wasn’t interested in cars at all. My older sister got her license three years before me, and I saw her having to play chauffeur to her friends in Dad’s Chevy. It didn’t seem like a good time, crazy as that sounds. I remember being crammed in the back…
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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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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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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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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…
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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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