ALFA ROMEO it

An international
driving odyssey
By Jack Juhasz
It was Wednesday already and we
were both shaking our heads. The
1969 Alfa Romeo Spider, our
proposed means of transportation for a
1600mi. driving safari to begin on
Thursday, was still in the shop, coughing
and wheezing worse then ever. The
engine, sitting in a freshly restored
automobile, was itself completely rebuilt
and had about one and a half hours
running time on it.
Said trip was to be from Toronto,
through New York City, to Philadelphia;
an estimated II-hour odyssey to the
Fairmount Park Vintage Car Festival in
Philadelphia, via the Big Apple itself, and
back to Toronto.
The simplistic idea of taking a car to a
mechanic for some fine tuning of
carburetors was fading quickly. Then
again, I'd never owned an Italian car with
Webers before. The latest report I had
was that the carbs weren't responding
properly to the adjustments and that they
probably needed to be rebuilt. A long
distance call to the previous owner
confirmed the invoice and Visa slip for
$283 in my hand-they really didn't need
to be rebuilt.
Deciding not to phone the mechanic
back to tell him he was wrong (that's
about as smart as sending back a burger
to a tattoo-laden short-order cook in a
greasy roadside diner-you're sure to get
it back with everything on it), I opted to
exercise diplomatic tactics.
After some theory-swapping, we
decided a "leak-down" test would prove
the engine's worth. Six eyes were glued to
the compression gauge during the test of
the last cylinder (I wear glasses), after
which a sigh of relief indicated this was,
thankfully, not the problem.
Ideas Junked
In one last-ditch effort, I went through
everything I could think of and by
midnight the garage resembled Kuwait
City with all the tools out of the box and
most of them imbedded in the walls.
Judging by the look of the Haynes manual
16 ALFA OWNER
on Weber carburetors I was using as
home plate, I'd walked every idea I had.
Helpless and weeping I went off to bed.
By Thursday at 1 p.m., the car hadn't
moved. I was in the office and Ian, my
life-long auto enthusiast-colleague,
sympathizer and co-pilot, was stuck in
traffic trying to get back to Toronto. He
phoned me to tell me we may have to
delay our departure an hour.
After 10 minutes of discussing how
much fun the trip was going to be, I tried
to approach the topic at the forefront of
both our minds: The engine was running
like it had stones in its shoes. It was a
vehicle bought on a 1000percent emotional
decision and we'd driven it a grand total
of 20 miles to a mechanic who couldn't
get it to run any better.
While I was trying to convince Ian that
both of us were unstable people, perhaps
in neeed of professional help, he was
babbling something about spark plugs.
No, I suppose it couldn't hurt to replace
them. Yes, they were the only things in
the engine that hadn't been replaced.
I made it back to the house first and
just stood in the garage shaking my head.
Ian arrived and handed over four new
spark plugs, along with a receipt for $46!
"They recommended that we use
Golden Lodge plugs. No one knew for
sure if the valves would clear regular
single electrode plugs," Ian said. I started
getting dizzy. "Cheer up, old boy," he
continued, "the tax is included."
I was just coming to as Ian turned in
the last new plug; he turned the key and
the engine came to life. The new exhaust
note yanked our mouths open and left OUf
jaws hanging. A couple of stabs at the gas
pedal and it actually responded!
We weren't about to ask any questions.
We quickly packed the car (mostly with