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The Lincoln KB V12 Mystery
Shims Suck, Let Me Tell You WhyBack 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
Five Methods for Sealing the Combustion ChamberI’ve worked on a pretty wide variety of engines 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 Lamborghini 400GT Project
An Engine With a Surprise Hiding Deep Inside…I worked on this Lamborghini 400GT 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 the…
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The Bugatti Type 35 Crankshaft Explained
A Look Inside the Artistry and Madness of Ettore's MasterpieceBugatti 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. The Bugatti’s practical rev limit was in the neighborhood of 6,000 PM, which…
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What’s it Take to Make an Old Bugatti Run Properly?
A Deep Dive into Some Pre-War French MachineryI 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 off the bat the car needed to be…
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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…
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The Talbot Lago Makes it to Pebble Beach
Overcoming challenges to finish the T26 engineI started working on this project back in 2016 in Colorado, the start 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 gives…
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Get to Work Ya Bum!
There has been a notable drop in the rate of new content being posted here at travelingwithtools. That’s because I’ve been back at work for a few weeks, and despite thinking I would be able to do two things at once, I have not. I’ve landed at the same Northern California shop that I worked…
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An Alfa Romeo 8C Project
Fixing a big leak on a new restorationThis 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 some sort of assembly issue. The normal procedure at work was to thoroughly document the car with photographs before disassembly, so I have a stack…
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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,…