Tuesday, February 01, 2011

Fiat - rear suspension

The rear wheels were off today and a little more of the wooden frame is in place. This will be shaped to fit the curves of the rear bodywork and will support the seats. It also houses the fuel tank. Mostly it's held together with beautifully done joints but the firewall has been screwed on - using big reclaimed screws from the same period...


An interesting thing i saw today was how almost every part right down to individual nuts and bolts are stamped with matching pairs of numbers so that you know exactly where they belong - almost like the joints on an oak framed building. If you look closer still you can see other scribed lines and dots - showing where to cut or file to. It's great to be able to see marks made by the engineers 100 years ago - it really brought home to me how hand-crafted cars used to be compared to todays machine made ones.

2 comments:

occhiolungo said...

damn, that's pretty cool about the markings on the screws and filed parts. And your sketches really catch my eye. Thanks for sharing!

stefan marjoram said...

I've taken a few photos of the markings - you can see them on the flickr site.