Mostly Alfa content, after one personal digression

["John Hertzman" <johnhertzman@domain.elided>]

First, with your indulgence, a personal note of no great relevance except for
some possible bearing on the likely quality and/or lack thereof of anything I
write over the next several weeks. Just before the start of the delightful,
but overly prolonged, 'Jap-bashing' thread (on which I have opinions, which I
hope to post in the Ducati-SUV-Off-Topic Digest as soon as I can get them
organized) I went into the shop to have a defective lower-right ball-joint
(bone-type, not glandular) replaced. My, that technology has evolved! Second
'My', am I ever glad that I have aged into the leftist/decadent Socialized
Medicine entitlement subgroup that right-thinking people used to warn me
about.

The immediate consequences for my forthcoming limited digest participation are
two: (one) that because of my two-house lifestyle division, for quite some
time I and my walker are not going to have any access to most of my hardcopy
Alfa material, so will be spouting at best some unchecked off-the-cuff and/or
fallible-memory detritus, and (two) my prescription pharmacopoeia now includes
little pills (with very vague use-directions) which they swear are not
addictive but which sometimes lead to creative bouts (of spelling, thoughts,
data-invention, and 'logic') which I can't make sense of afterwards. My past
better-living-through-chemistry experience never went beyond alcohol, which
stopped a third of a century ago, so pleasurable hallucinations are a new
experience which I will try to keep off the digest.



So. 17" wheels on Spiders. (I don't do Spiders, but I own one on TV?) Alfa's
engineers, who didn't know any better, used 13" wheels on the TZ 2, the 33/2
(both competition and Stradale versions), the unfortunately aborted Scarabeo,
the 33TT12, 1750 GT Am, 2000 GT Am, most if not all of the outrageous
factory-built Alfetta rally cars, and I don't know what-all else. What was on
the grand generation of DTM 155s? I don't know, those files are at the other
house.

I remember pretty good reasons for large wheel diameters on farm carts-
mainly, keeps the axles about as high as the bellies of the draft animals,
which was one of the main limits on dirt-road passability in inclement
weather. I remember pretty good reasons for large wheel diameters on urban
carriages, the circumferences bridging the interstices between cobbles for
smoother passage. I remember there having been pretty good reasons for large
wheel diameters on high-performance drum-brake cars. I seem to remember there
having been excellent reasons for going to successively smaller wheel
diameters, on other cars as well as Alfas, until the Mini with its ten-inch
wheels apparently pushed the limits. Once the less problematical disks
replaced the supremely elegant drums there was little reason to not drop from
15", inherited from the drum-braked Giuliettas, to 14" for the 1750, and to
13" for the Alfasuds, Guilietta Nuovas, some 75s, and the serious performance
cars.

Now we have a big chicken/egg cycle going; the two reasons most frequently
cited for going large are (one) looks, or whatever you want to call the
testosterone factor and (two) tire-size availability. If it was convenient and
not too expensive to get Stradale-sized (and lookalike) wheels and
corresponding state-of-today's-art tires I would be surprised if most of the
top club Spiders and wannabees weren't wearing 13" wheels. (Goes for the
hotshot Verdes too.) But that is just my peculiar opinion.

Webers vs. Spica. OK, I will concede the whole nine yards of the pro-Spica
argument - more power, more speed, faster response, better economy, no
pollution, an ingenious mechanical computer uncontaminated by Intel, absolute
reliability, last forever, never any problem. Still- I had some peculiar
reasons for falling for Alfa long ago, reasons which had nothing to do with
any of the ways in which Spicas are arguably better, and by those reasons
Webers are the Alfas of the carburettor world. Both are archaic, both relics
of a Camelot, a fictional Golden Age. My original reasons were largely
illusions, but there was  some truth to them and I was willingly complicit in
my deception. I will accept and in many ways admire Spica (and Bosch) but
Weber and the relatively legitimate evolved 'Weber' we call Dellorto belong in
the Pantheon which stretches back past Galileo. If that makes no sense, so be
it.

And yet - while Alfa did use a SuperSpica on the Montreal, and various
Lucas/Spica hybrids in competition, I am aware of no rush outside the USA to
convert inferior carbureted Alfas to superior injected Spica/Alfas. Granted,
they are all Bosch now, but pre-Bosch the rest of the world had over a decade
to understand the advantages of Spica and mine our boneyards of their monopoly
on good used systems. One wonders why they didn't.

Colli. Anthony Colli in Vermont asks "where could I get more info about these
cars?

Just as I feel that the Biscaretti museum in Turin is probably more valuable
for a fuller understanding of Alfa Romeo than the Alfa museum is - because it
offers the context of the entire Italian automobile industry, enabling one to
place Alfa among its predecessors, peers, and competitors - the most valuable
(to me) single book  in my Alfa library is "L'Automobile - produzione e design
a Milano 1879-1949", a magnificent thick and scholarly catalog of a
magnificent exhibition produced in 1990. There is of course much on Alfa, but
also much on Bianchi, on Isotta Fraschini, and on Autobianchi and Innocenti;
and on the supporting Milanese industries- Pirelli, Marelli, Borletti, Borrani
- and on the major Milanese coachbuilders - Castagna, Carrozzeria Italiana &
Cesare Sala, Touring, and Zagato; and smaller entries on over a hundred other
companies; biographical material on seventy of the major engineers, short
histories of another fifty coachbuilders, and more biographies of the
individuals in the coachbuilding industry . If you want to find out about
Colli, who did the Colli wagons (and much else) for Alfa, or about the
connection between Brianza and Zagato, or about Prinetti & Stucchi (where
Etorre Bugatti worked before he left Milan), or about what sorts of cars were
being built in Milan before Alfa started, this book is the place to start. Out
of print, of course, but worth grabbing if you have a chance, and worth
seeking if you are really curious. Per my fading memory it has less than a
page on the Colli family and business, and I can't get to it until I am fully
ambulatory. If Anthony Colli in Vermont can be patient I will be glad to copy
those parts for him then, if he doesn't have a more convenient source.

Enuf. I'll try to get my sass about cultures and creativity onto the offtopic
digest in a few days, prolly not tomorrow. G'night, eh?

Cheers, all.

JH
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