A Leslie Wong Blog

The previous owner of our BMW Bavaria put in a Momo V35 steering wheel. It felt great when driving in a sporting manner. But now the leather by the top spokes is worn, so I bought a Momo Super Indy on eBay – probably because I remembered my parents’ Bavaria had the OE wooden steering wheel (the diameter of which has been likened to a bus steering wheel). The Momo steering wheels are a nice 350 mm (~13.78 inches).

I’m not sure if the Super Indy looks right, with the polished aluminum spokes. At least the color of the wood on the steering wheel relates to the color of the wood on the dash (like the color of your necktie should relate to the color of your socks – ask Egon von Fürstenberg).

Maybe I should have looked for a Nardi steering wheel.

The Big Picture (from Boston.com): Dakar Rally 2010. (37 photos total)

The 31st running of the Dakar Rally is being held in South America for the second year, instead of the traditional African route, due to ongoing security concerns. This year’s race began and will end in Buenos Aires, covering a looping 9,000 kilometers between Argentina and Chile over 14 stages. 362 Teams began the race with 176 motorcycles and quad bikes, 134 cars, and 52 trucks. The race is just over halfway completed now, the winners expected to cross the finish line on January 16th. Collected here are several photographs from the first 8 stages of this year’s rally.

Photo credit: BuBcSek

A few years ago, I was remembering Buzz-A-Rama, the slot car track in Brooklyn and some of my slot car experiences in New York.

I found this nice video by Rahul Chadha on Buzz and the track in Brooklyn. It looks like it’s still supported by parties for kids. I didn’t see any indication of organized racing, e.g., USRA (United Slot Racers Association) or ISRA (International Slot Racing Association). The track was never on those circuits when I used to go there.

I wondered how Buzz could stay in business all these years until I saw that track time was $20/hr on the Blue King. Maybe Buzz-A-Rama’s longevity is just a result of the interest in slot car racing that seems to have a revival every couple of years.

The Buzz-A-Rama 500 from Gorilla Face on Vimeo.

When we first got our 1972 BMW Bavaria, the paint was failing. I bought this Makita 9227C 7-Inch Hook and Loop Electronic Polisher/Sander to try to save it.

I didn’t know that the paint was already dead. All the Meguiar’s compounds, glazes and waxes couldn’t save it. After hours of work, the paint would look good for a week or two.

Now, with relatively new (single stage) paint on the car, it’s a different story. After washing the car, I’ve been using Meguiar’s NXT Generation Tech Wax, Zymol Cleaner Wax or Eagle One’s NanoWax, applied by hand with a foam pad.

Then the Makita polisher, with a wool polishing bonnet or a foam pad, removes the wax easily and leaves the paint nicely polished. It doesn’t take a lot of effort and the paint shines; I’m just trying to protect it. I still dread having to wax the car, but it turns out, with the Makita polisher, it really isn’t a big effort now.

This is what I’d call a complete road test.

This week is the big car week on the Monterey Peninsula. The weekend before the Rolex Monterey Historic Automobile Races at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca, they have the “Pre-Historics.” A lot of racers are already setup in the paddock and anyone can go in and look around if you pay the $6 parking fee, which is about my speed.

We saw some of the practice for Group 7A, 1964-1971 FIA Mfg. Championship Cars: there were two 1969 Porsche 917Ks, a 1970 Ferrari 512S, 1969 Ford GT-40, a 1968 Alfa Romeo T33/2 and various Porsche 908s.

In Group 7B, 1973-1980 IMSA GT, GTX, AAGT Cars, there was Henry Schmitt’s (whose father started German Motors in San Francisco in the 60’s) 1974 BMW 3.5 CSL. I saw it in the paddock with hood off and took a piture of the engine. There were also a bunch of Porsche 935s, a bunch of 1977 Dekon Monzas and various Porsche 911 RSRs.

There were three Bonhams cars that are going to auction next Friday: a 1975 BMW 3.0 CSL in Taiga, the metallic green that looked ugly to me; a 1929 Bentley 4½-Liter (the Mrs. said, “This must have been where they came up with the term wind screen”) and a 1939 Auto Union 3-liter V12 Grand Prix Racing Single-Seater. When we went back to the parking lot (we drove the Bavaria), there was an E9 parked behind us. As we were leaving, we saw the Auto Union broken down on the track while doing a demo lap – they were attaching a tow rope the a fire truck.

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One night, while driving through the grove of Eucalyptus trees on US 101 near San Juan Bautista, California, I realized that the sealed beam headlamps on my Alfetta were inadequate. This is the same road that Scottie Ferguson and Madeleine Elster (Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak) took to Mission San Juan Bautista in the film Vertigo.

A modern car had pulled up next to me in the other lane and I suddenly saw the road ahead. That’s when I realized that I had to improve the lighting on the Alfa Romeo.

Research turned up 5.75 inch (146 mm) Cibie H4 (low beam) and H1 (high beam) headlamps for the quad setup I needed. For the H1 headlamp, I used Osram Silverstar bulbs (NOT Sylvania Silverstar) and for the H4, I used Narva Rangepower High Output Plus 30 bulbs.

This setup is more economical than the Cibie Complex Surface Reflector (CSR) headlamps and I’m only replacing the right side headlamps in my crashed into Alfetta. Osram Sylvania produces a Xenarc HID conversion kit I’ve seen for US$ 588.

I’ve read that installing relays was a good idea for the Alfa, since the factory setup has all the headlight current going through the switch on the steering column. Daniel Stern has covered this and other lighting topics so thoroughly that I didn’t have to look anywhere else.

Comparing the Cibie headlamps to sealed beams is literally like day and night.

A little over two months ago, an incompetent driver slammed into my parked Alfa Romeo. The Alfetta was in the body shop for 46 days while I argued with State Farm over the value of the car and searched for replacement parts.

I was lucky to find some Euro-bumpers on AlfaBB.com. Larry Jr., at Alfa Parts Exchange was more than helpful in getting me grills and headlight buckets. I was up in Berkeley, so I made a personal appearance at Alfa Parts and bought a reproduction turn signal lens, complete with white gasket. Skip, at J & J Autobody in Monterey, did very nice sheet metal work.

Daniel Stern only had a 5.75 inch Cibie H4 headlamp. I had great difficulty finding a 5.75 inch, flat face, Cibie H1 headlamp. A deep Google search for Cibie “flat face” led me to Joe English, owner of Group2 Motorsports for the H1 headlamp. The last thing I’m waiting for are some Osram SilverStar H1 bulbs I bought on eBay.

In the end, it’s an experience I prefer not to have gone through.

The fuel gauge on the Bavaria stopped working.

I was hoping that it was only a bad ground connection on the instrument cluster. On my first repair attempt, I hit the top of the dash above the instrument cluster to jostle the connections and take out some frustration. When only the latter worked, I looked at my BMW repair CD.

To test the fuel gauge, the repair manual said to connect the brown-yellow wire on the fuel level sender to ground and to switch on the ignition momentarily. The gauge deflected to full, so I knew the gauge and grounds were OK. But that meant the sender was broke.

RealOEM.com lists the price of new sender at $261.40 (USD), so that was a good reason to try to fix it.

After I moved all the crap in the trunk to one side, I lifted the carpet and unscrewed the floor panel covering the gas tank.

The gas tank was full. When I tried pulling the sender out of the tank, (it’s a bayonet mount) gas poured out into the trunk. I decided to take a drive down Highway 1 a little south of Point Lobos to lower the fuel level.

The fuel sender is basically a variable resistor. The float moves up and down a guide rod and is also connected to a wire of known resistance. The change in resistance (by the position of the float) is translated by the fuel gauge as the range from full to empty.

One end of the sensor wire had broken off its terminal connection so the wire was now too short to connect to the terminal. I used a piece of 22 gauge solid copper wire (looped and soldered to the connector) to extend the connection so the sensor wire would reach its terminal. Since the sensor wire is a continuous run from one terminal to the other, I had to figure out the routing around the bottom of the sender. It seemed to just wrap around – at least that’s how I did it.

The repair manual says the resistance between the G terminal and minus should measure 3.2 & 73.7 ohms at the extreme positions of the float. I measured 3.4 and 84.7 ohms so at least my repair sorta worked.