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B20 Restoration |
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In 2005, I acquired a very rough B20. It was a car that had belonged to my old friend, Walt Spak in Pittsburgh, who had the car under cover since 1975. Walt and I had been Aurelia pals that far back with many talks trying to figure out the most interesting of the six B20 series. With little knowledge of the earlier cars, we settled on the s.2 as having a linkage to the competition cars, odd little tail fins, and the earlier 2L motor and suspension. Mind you, we had never seen one.
Then I found an ad in a club newsletter for an s.2 for $1200; It had been abandoned in 1963, and sat since then. Walt agreed to go get it, but after seeing photos of this rusty hulk, I had second thoughts, so Walt bought it from me. Some thirty years later, I bought it back. It was midnight and we'd had a bit to drink. The restoration was total. Having done a B24 convertible several years before, it was clear that this would not be an easy restoration. The earlier cars (then and still now) are very thin here in the US, and finding all the parts and getting the detailing right was key. A good s.2 in Switzerland, belonging to Alred Tschudin, was critical as a baseline for the work. The story of the restoration has been compiled in a small booklet (aurelia-restoration ) which is available for on-line printing. Below are some photos of the work. The car had been driven from Chicago to NYC in the early 1960s, blown up its engine, and been abandoned since then. So while it had only about 10 years of use (1952-1962), it had a hard life. The bones of the structure were quite good, once you saw past the condition. So we stripped the entire car, dipped it in epoxy primer (never again, rust!), and rebuilt it carefully. It took about 3 years, with a maiden outing in 2008. It then took a few more years to get it to be reliable, but finally everything settled in and the car happily did the Colorado Grand in 2015, and I took it on a 3,000 mile trip to the East Coast and back in 2106. |
Original Condition
Restoration work
POSTSCRIPT
The restoration was complete in 2008, and I took the car to a Lancia Club reunion in Pittsburgh. It ran well, but on the way home, one of the babbitt bearings on the conrods failed. The car went to Pittsburgh, and Walt undertook to rebuild the engine, as Scott (who had done it before) had lost his long battle with cancer. It took 18 months for the engine to be completed but then the car was ready for travel. After a few years of use, there still seemed to be issues with the front suspension, so in 2015, it was pulled and sent to Thornley Kelham in England to be redone. They had done a few s.2 B20 suspensions, and Simon Thornley put the suspension on his own s.2 and tested it before sending it back. When fitted, the new suspension made a big difference, and the car happily went to Colorado Grand, and on a 3,000 mile trip to the East Coast.
