Italy, Italians, Italian Cars

[Chris Kane <branzck@domain.elided>]

Gidday all - We're back from our sojourn around parts less familiar, and
again thanks to all of those who offered suggestions (off digest) on where
we should go in Italy etc. It as a blast, Hertz-supplied (New) Ford Mondeo
2.0 TD notwithstanding. It cruised the autostrada OK at 160 km/h, in
relative silence, but it was just Too Damned Big. And not a 156.

Anyhoo, we also survived Turkey and Egypt, the latter not currently a
particularly pleasant place to be, and made it back to NZ, where work on the
reassembly of my '70 GTV continues. Two questions to stretch the brains
(well, maybe) of the Digesti. Firstly, how does one remove the rear axles
from the back axle tubes. That is, how do you pull them out so that you can
dismantle, clean and paint the splash shields axle tubes etc etc. The book
says to use a puller and they should just slip out, presumably meaning that
the relevant differential pinion is independently located and will not fall
off once the inner end of the half-shaft is removed. However, having tried
that, with no success, I'm wondering if that is in fact the way, or are
there circlips that I need to worry about hidden in the diff, or what? I
applied a reasonably heft force to get it out, with no joy, and could have
applied more - but I'm convinced that more force = more dollars (somewhere
down the line) when you break things because you weren't  using the right
method.

The second question is this: in my nice clean 1750 block, my nice new liners
are installed, along with the pistons rods etc (no head yet - it hasn't
soaked up enough money yet and so isn't ready to leave the engine shop) .
Everything turns smoothly, as you would expect. However, I have noticed that
the middle two liners (i.e. cylinders 2 and 3) don't QUITE touch. There are
flats machined on them, but although all of the others touch nicely (and yes
I know the flats are machined to different depths, to give asymmetric bore
centres, they don't quite meet in the middle. Is this significant?

Ciao 4 now,

Chris Kane
1970 1750 GTV - Spread widely around
1976 AlfaSud Ti - All together, but trying to spread itself around

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