Cars Archives - Page 8 of 17 - A Leslie Wong Blog

August 3, 2009July 7, 2019

Cibie H1

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.

August 1, 2009November 18, 2019

Alfa Romeo Alfetta Sprint Veloce

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.

July 26, 2009May 6, 2025

BMW Fuel Sender Repair

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.

March 1, 2009July 25, 2021

World’s Top 15 Race Courses, As Seen By Google Earth

netgeek06 over at digg writes, “As we stand waiting at the starter tree of the 2009 motorsports season, we’ve let our minds wander across the infinite expanses of Google Earth, finding these shots of the world’s top 15 race courses.“

Number 7 is Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca in Monterey, California, near my house.

January 3, 2009March 25, 2019

Alfa Romeo Alfetta GT

Giugiaro's original sketches for the Alfetta GT prototype — Giugiaro’s original sketches for the Alfetta GT prototype

Thanks to my friend Kenny, I have an Alfetta Sprint Veloce.

Thanks to my friend Steve Fields, purveyor of automobilia, I now have the book, Alfa Romeo Alfetta GT by David Owen. Owen is the author of numerous Alfa Romeo books.

Alfa Romeo Alfetta GT covers some of the history of Alfa Romeo, the Alfetta’s family tree, Alfa Romeo racing and the Alfetta GT through the GTV6.

The Alfetta GT chapter outlines the design ideas and engineering solutions to problems such as weight distribution and rear axle design. The result being a clutch-transmission-final drive unit, DeDion rear axle and in-board disc brakes.

I’ve read that Giorgetto Giugiaro‘s original design for the Alfetta GT had retractable headlights, but I’d never seen any images. Owen’s book illustrates that with some of Giugiaro’s original sketches.

For the illiterate crowd, there are eight pages of color photographs plus black and white photographs of Alfettas and its predecessors throughout the book.