Hugh R |
12-22-2016 07:49 AM |
I sold it because I wasn't driving it much anymore and when I rebuilt it the parts, like main bearings from AM were crap. They hadn't re-tooled any of the dies since the 70's. I needed main bearing clearances of .750 to 1.25 thou clearances, the bearings supplied by AM gave me clearances of 3 thou. I ended up having the crank ground 20 thou and hard chrome plated back to get the correct clearances. I had to have pistons made by Vanolia in Long Beach. If you needed ANY trannie parts, you were hosed, as it was a David Brown transmission and they only made a few hundred extra trannies in the World. The alternative was to cut the drive shaft, weld in new trannie mounts and stuff in a German ZF which made the car a jalopy and killed the originality.
I sold it as a matching numbers car to the Prime Minister of Kuwait for stupid (then) money.
I miss it, but it was the right time for me to sell. At the time, it represented about 1/4 of my net worth. A very rich man's (not me) toy.
Bought it in 1971 in the UK when I was in the USMC for $1,750, about the price of a used Ford Pinto, and shipped it to Boston, the British Colonel I bought it from had acquired it in the Sudan, it was originally sold in Switzerland. So I owned it for 36 years.
Took the money, paid off ALL my debt, including lingering bills from Donna's breast cancer surgery, bought a beach condo in Oxnard, CA which has doubled in value since then and dumped the rest into the stock market at its very lowest in 2008, and I've done real, real well with that.
If you're remotely interested, here is a link to what it looked like when I did a run with the Porsche boys with it. http://forums.pelicanparts.com/porsche-911-technical-forum/139551-mulholland-drive-today-pics-ferrari-learns-her-place.html
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