Wilson’s 6C2500 Coupe Gets Roadworthy

Story and photos by Paul Wilson

Lest we forget, over the past few years, Paul Wilson has designed and created three distinct cars on Alfa Romeo chassis; a beautiful coupe and sister roadster on 6C 2500 chassis, and a B.A.T. recreation on a 1900 chassis. He has chronicled each in the pages of VeloceToday. Below is an update on the status of his 6C2500 coupe, which is now roadworthy. Click here to read a previous story about the adventures of building the coupe.

When Pete first suggested that I write about my projects, I told him I couldn’t because they weren’t finished. What kind of story has no ending? Just write, he said. So I did, and it’s been fun.

But the problem didn’t go away, and now I’ve reached the mess that I foresaw. Supplier delays and unexpected problems have continually postponed the happy endings I was so eager to write. The 6C2500 coupe, nearly done seven years ago, is now truly done. But the final stages were agony. The roadster still awaits its engine, though there was still some work I could do on it. Only the BAT, seemingly the most farfetched of them all, has made steady progress.

This doesn’t make a tidy story. The English professor side of me is appalled. As an essay, such a heap of loosely-related ramblings deserves no grade above a D. But another side of me says, hey, there’s a lot of real-world insight here, on issues faced by other restorers. And you can’t just run out on readers who have followed these stories from the beginning. So, here’s an update.

The coupe had problems with its paint and its gearbox. The paint on the right front fender cracked before the car reached home on the trailer, exposing primer-free bare metal. Rather than struggle further with that painter (he’d already had the car four years), I tried another. For a vast price, he did a beautiful paint job–but reshaped the fender with plastic filler. Underneath, the metal gently curved upwards; on top was a sharp vee. It was an obvious mismatch with the other side. My complaints fell on deaf ears. I tried a third painter, who did it right–but took two and a half years.

The original gearbox used a column shift, connected to a selector near the bellhousing. I spent hours designing a linkage to a shift lever, but the four-foot-long rods needed to go where the clutch pedal was. So, how about a cable system, like front-drive cars use now? I worked out how an H-pattern shifter could translate the right movements, and built one. It worked badly, and looked terrible. Nobody used cables in 1948.

I wanted my car to be mechanically correct, just like any other 6C2500. But where do you draw the line? Restoring a car with a notoriously weak crankshaft, for example, do you make it authentic just so it can break its crank in period-correct fashion? Aside from the linkage problems, the 6C gearbox wasn’t strong enough. The donor car for my project had its disassembled gearbox in the trunk. And increasingly in recent years, a gearbox “update” is becoming acceptable, even on upscale classics. I had an adapter made, and put in a 5-speed from a GTV. It didn’t fit, of course. Working nervously in the concours-perfect interior, I chopped and welded modifications in the frame’s central X-brace. The engine came out, went in, came out, etc.

Small details often take disproportionate time and ingenuity. My beautiful steering wheel had a hole in the center, exposing the attachment nut. The solution cost me hours of thought–but about $2. A faucet-hole cover for a kitchen sink fit perfectly.

I had a local machinist working on a wing nut hold-down for the spare, but he suddenly disappeared. Then I saw one online for a Ferrari 250, but it was expensive and might not fit. I ordered one anyway, and got lucky. The metric threads needed only slight trimming in a die.

Then I noticed some tiny holes in the cam covers. Plates with engine data were originally riveted on there, but they always fall off. AFRA had them, though, and they add a nice touch.

When I started the engine for the first time, I was shocked by the scream made by the supercharger. It’s supposed to scream, said the maker. But this much? It sounded terrible. By a miracle, I had a visit from someone with vast experience building exotic gearboxes. He diagnosed an incorrectly made (oversized) gear in the supercharger drive, making that sound when the teeth bottomed out. A gear specialist in Detroit trimmed it to the right size. That didn’t fully quiet the supercharger, but while it’s loud at idle, the pitch goes above normal hearing range at driving speeds. Any dog nearby will have aching ears.

And there’s more, of course. The dash gauge showed low oil pressure, and I worried that adding an oil filter caused the problem. But a test gauge mounted at the filter gave normal readings; the dash gauge was at fault.

Then I couldn’t get a firm brake pedal. I found that these cars originally had some kind of valve under the brake fluid reservoir. What did this do? The reservoir, of course, was long gone. Finally I installed residual pressure valves in the brake circuits, and the problem was solved. What are these? I’d never heard of them before.

This humbling experience, of discovering my ignorance of something essential, still happens to me. Is that because, as an English professor, I never had proper training as a mechanic? That’s what I always think before I consult an expert. But then, most of the time, I find that they know even less than I do.

I did just one two-mile test run before the weather got too cold. I promised Pete that in the spring I’ll take him for a ride, so when warm days come, I’ll be busy.