First came a Type 49 Bugatti built in '32, which we got in the late '50s.  This was a drophead coupe, a straight 8 with single overhead cam, double ignition (wiring).  On the right, Dad is rounding a bend in a hill climb at French Lick, Indiana in the fall of 1959 with my older brother Bill in the passenger seat..

Wonderful Marchal headlights: they must have drawn 25 amp, and it was like driving a lighthouse down the road.  Laughable aiming (On big honking nut held them on and they could only be pivoted left and right): when someone came at you, you flipped on the high beams, which went into the trees.  The wheels were another visionary engineering feat of Bugatti's: a cast iron drum cast into an aluminum finned wheel.  Yes, you can see aluminum fin brake drums from the 60's, but in '32?  Another charming feature of these cars were the fitted wooden floorboards.  When you wanted to work on anything below them, they simple unclipped and were removable: you didn't need a "creeper", you just removed the seats (one wingnut apiece), rolled up the carpet, removed the floorboards, and there you were.
What's involved in doing a valve job of a Bugatti engine?  Ettore once lost a race because of a lousy head gasket.  Thereafter, in his autocratic way, he decided that he would eliminate them, to not have a detachable head.....so doing a valve job involves removing the engine, turning it upside down, removing the crankcase and bearing caps, then pulling the crank with everything attached.  Finally reaching down the long stroke cylinder bore to grind the valve seats.
My father collected artisans and craftsmen...and so took the engine to the machine shop connected to the district mopar warehouse, where the resident wizard...a gleeful, cheroot smoking hunch-bank, not-quite-a-dwarf, Mr. Litrell, took it in hand with the help of his strong right (and young) arm, Jerry.  I saw it all apart and upside down while they were doing the straight 8 SOHC engine from the T49.

For anyone that wants it, here is a 2000x1350 .bmp file of the above image to use as wallpaper background on your computer monitor.  Fell free to pass it on, but do not sell it; all rights reserved and I (Stewart Dean) would appreciate attribution. Copyright 2009

Notice that, with the hood up, you could get between the firewall and the dashboard; real easy to work on.  Also that, as in the real race machines of that age, the tach gets pride of place in front of the driver....the speedo is over to the side!  (Double click on these pictures to see them bigger).

These images were done with a 5x7 view camera using Plus-X; these are scanned from contact prints.  The background is the old Speed estate in Louisville, KY.  They were a fast pass I did for Dad in the early when he sold the T40 (from the then princely sum of $10,000 <sigh>.

Here are two shots of Dad in the T40; one done with the view camera and a much earlier 35mm shot from 1967 with him at speed with the dogs.  My old Anglia 130 from college days is in the background....what a lovely engine and gearbox it had.  If Ford had pushed them in the US, the VW Beetle woud've never had a chance! If you've seen the Harry Potter movies, it was the flying car in them!

Though I never thought much about it, my father let me work on these cars!  That, of course,  was part of why he'd gotten them: for the experience, to suck his sons into machinery.  He didn't buy things for possession, rather for another facet of a Renaissance-man experience of life.  So I adjusted the brakes on the T49; they'd been marginal, but when I finished they worked.  Ettore had this wonderful Rube Goldberg lash up that made cable brakes work as well as hydraulics.  If you ever see a Bugatti, see if you can get the owner to show you the side-to-side brake balancing yoke; it is a piece of engineering art. 

There I am, young, thin, plenty of hair, the world ahead of me...and wearing pince-nez, which I'd asked Dad for as a high-school grad present.

When I was a freshman at Amherst, we all had a composition course where we had to write and write and write.  I wanted to write (stream of consciousness stuff) about the Bugattis, about what it is like to have a real, pure-blooded class automobile in your hands...and the professor, a neurasthenic Jewish (I'm jewish enough I can say this) hyper Eastern intellectual wanted us to write, I dunno, maybe J.D Salinger stuff.  He Could Not Stand me wanting to write about cars.  It was Trade School Stuff.  What an idiot, what an uttter lack of imagination...to demand a particular kind of imagination and completely miss the validity of an utterly different sort .  Cars can defintely have character or even a sort of soul...and reflect the mind and spirits of their creators.

The Type 40 Now

...lives in Switzerland in loving hands, is in use (not just a trailer queen) and looks like this:

        

My father and the Bugs 

Someone said/asked:

“I’m still trying to pick my jaw up of the floor. You learned how to drive/wrench in/on Jean Bugatti’s personal T40?! Simply incredible.”

 Yes.  My father was a eye surgeon, a fierce loving, deeply devoted husband to my mother (who had been almost completely paralyzed by polio a year after my birth), an all around tool and knowledge freak and Renaissance man.  He had this incredible gift for finding, learning and coming to know quality in art, work and life.  He painted/sculpted passably, he cooked well, made sourdough bread (“You knead the dough until it is the consistency of a soft but firm young breast”) and gardened *very* well with a greenhouse we built with him full of his camellias.  He wanted and was always on the lookout for something we could do close to home (in the days before handicap access and parking).  One was something to learn my brother and I about machines: old cars. Funny: recall that then (1960 or so) these cars were 30 years old: like a 1980 Chevy now.  Anyway, no one much then knew or much cared about old cars, certainly not in Kentucky.  We got the T49 from De Dobbeleer of Brussels in 1959 and T40 from Loyens, of Luxemburg and the Netherlands in 1960.  He had it ex-works from Molsheim. Bugattis in France itself are National Treasures not allowed sold out of the country.
....
My father knew what the Bugattis were: a priceless, pure-bred of highest standard...but few other did then.  Another time, another place, gone.

My father experienced the hell out of the Bugattis, gave my brother and I a priceless experience...and then gracefully surrendered them when his life didn't allow him to give them their due.  He was then 62 or so, eight years younger than I am as I write this.  A man of parts.

And…while this was Jean’s car, it was also a plaything, like an Austin Healey Sprite of incomparable class.  Jean’s real cars were the bigger, more powerful GP racers and roadster Type 54 and 57S.  This Type 40 was a bagatelle for a summer’s picnic in the country
"

...and a Maserati 3500 GT

Round about 1962, a man in his 50's died of cancer and left his Maserati to an uncle in his 80s (who hadn't driven a stick in 40 years).  Said uncle had just bought a new Cadillac with all the trimmings, and his attempts to drive the Maserati left him shaken, so back he went to the Caddy dealership and asked them to unload it for him.

   

Cadillacs were never a performance car,  and this car, the first production GT car Maserati made (after racing for quite a while against the likes of Ferrari), was.  The salesmen there put their heads together....and then called Dad.  He dickered some with them, and ended up paying the prices of a new Buick, $3000. I confess, while I could drive the Bugs at level of their capacities, the Maserati showed me I wasn't good enough to push its capability...but it brought me home chastened without bending anything. Above is Dad on the left, me at age 20 on the right.

When we got the Maserati, it wouldn't idle worth a damn.  Now I'm no real mechanic (though a big part of why Dad got it and the Bugattis was to give not only the experience of driving but also of wrenching) and after tinkering around under the hood for a while, I discovered the problem.  Those Webers (initially hidden behind an long air cleaner and complete with velocity stacks) came at various level of fitment.  Ours were the cheapest level, and the the brass throttle shafts had worn into the pot metal case so that, when the thrrottle was released to idle, the butterfly never closed quite the same way twice, thus the idle couldn't be set..  These carbs at a higher level were fitted with ball-bearing races, I discovered from reading Weber docs.  Now there was a casting cup collar where the brass throttle shafts exited the carb body that was probably machined for the ball bearing races, but left otherwise unfinished on these cheaper carbs.  I put on my thinking cap (I must have been 14-15) and realized that an oilite bearing could be machined to fit in those caps.  My father, ever encouraging in this sort of thing (and many others...he paid for me to learn to fly) sent me to a machine shop he knew, I had them made and the fix worked perfectly: a silk-smooth. gutsy idle.

Driving the T40

"I had come into the turn way too fast. The tires broke free. “Oh God, no, I am going to crash this lovely little bus.” And then I found myself in a perfectly controllable four-wheel slide, drifting through the turn at 45mph, glee in my heart. It was probably 1964, and I was driving my father’s pride and joy, a type 40 Bugatti. But not one of the stogy little sedans. This was one of two subscale body prototypes for the ultimate Bugatti, the Type 57S Atlantique"  For more of this essay, click on the title above...

...and now I have been published in the NYTimes, writing on cars!

Here are pictures of representative Type 57SC that the Type 40 was the concept prototype for:


These images are copyright of Paradise Garage, London, England, who have this car for sale at 300,000 pounds sterling;
http://www.paradisegarage.co.uk
I requested use of this images.

The apotheosis of this body design was the Aéro Coupé Antlantique

Other vehicles in the garages of my life

The International Harvester Scout... one of the first SUVs

The fine machine from International Cornbinders.  I had round about 1970, even put the overdrive accessory for the transfer case in and decked it out with BIG tires from Dick Cepek of West Coast off-roading supplies fame.   It would go anywhere with big floaty tires....except that, as the salty old guy with 2WD tow truck explained when I went into deep snow on an uplowed back road, "It don't matter how many wheels you got turning if none of them are touching the ground".  He also opined that, it was a good thing I hadn't gone out further than his tow cable would stretch, else I'd have had to wait for spring..

My Cornbinder never dropped me flat, but there was always, always one of more things hanging off or not working right.  I could never get full throttle pressing the accelerator, had to use the (thank you IH for having it) the dash mounted carburetor throttle knob for full (pant, pant) accel.  Turned out the bell crank was metal on metal, no nylon bushing, and the shaft had worn into the bell crank until there was so much play that full throttle from the accelerator didn't happen.

I built a pop-up top for it with a king-sized bed....then I went on a road trip (my one and only) to Nova Scotia and Newfoundland.  Gorgeous country, the west coast.  I got just beyond Corner Brook, a drownded  estuary with tree clad mountains in the seas, when the exhaust manifold cracked.  After a bit of driving with the noise of that roaring 4 cylinder, I turned back (never got to Glacier Bay).  About 12 miles north of the ferry landing, the starter motor, which was intermittent, went out.  I had three guys push me for a jump start and at 3 or so MPH, I popped the clutch.....the engine started, but the axle broke.  I crawled underneath, motor running, and dropped/removed the rear drive shaft, put it in 4WD and proceeded to the ferry with an effective FWD.  On the ferry, I had to shut it down, then I prayed to the Cornbinder god that it would start when I got to the mainland.  It did.  Driving with a busted semi-captive axle was interesting...the wheel with the busted axle wobbled, the hydaulic brakes didn't work, but, fortunately, the hand brake did.  In Halifax, I went to the IH dealer only to hear, "Sonny, all Scouts brought into CA have heavy-duty axles and yours is a stnadard duty....got none of them" .  But he suggested a maritime ship yard that maybe could help me.  I jacked the Scout up, removed the broken axle....which included fishing out the far end with a split plastic shower rod cover.  Went to the shipyard with both pieces, goggled at the lathe with a 50' bed (for propeller shafts?) and was told, 'Yep, I can weld it, but it won't last: axless are forged, and the weld will be mild steel" .  <sigh>  The welding was done, I tried to flush the worst of the chips out (from the outboard end of the semi-captive axle thrrashing around inside the differential tube out to the wheel and reinstalled the axle and went off driving very carefully through Nova Scotia towards the US border.  Barely got there, and BANG there went the axle again.  Got a new axle, again fished out the inboard end of the old one, tried rreally had to flush out all the chips and put in the new axle.  Life was good...until about  six months later,when there was a different BANG from the rear in the pouring rain.  I went around back to see a steam differential with hole in the banjo coverplate where some piece of the diff had departed at speed.  FWD time again.

Oh yeah, I know about the legendary Scout dependability.  But I was young and learning.....

A Mini, the true original Mini and a late model 1998 version...

...that wasn't such a god-awful mess of bad electrics (All hail, Lucas, Prince of Darkness) and ridiculously spartan interiors as the earlier ones.  I got it imported under fals pretenses as a 1973....since it violated nearly every safety, design and emissions requirement in the DOT rule books

At left, it's all packed up for its trip across the pond, at right with the pilot in command

    

The original, the real thing, 1500 pounds light and the final Rover design with the Twin Point Injection 1.3 liter engine

 factory metallic purple, 30K orig miles, LHD (German Export), Computerised fuel injection, catalytic conveter (passeds Euro emissions), factory coilpack ignition, factory immobilizer wireless remote, airbag, no rust, rally tire roof rack, driving lights,MPH/KPH speedos, Walnut Dash, OEM Smiths Oil Pressure Gauge. Aftermarket Engine stabilizer, air horns, in dash Pioneer cassette/FM/AM radio with remote (under back seat) CD changer, Roll Bar, Factory Driving Lights,  Aftermarket seat adapters to put seat further back for tall people, Wink Rear-View Mirror, Wiring for Valentine Radar Detector. Stronger Guessworks rebuild Transmission/Diff (A+ Rod Change Gearbox, 2.7 Final Drive, Full Diff rebuild with Moly Diff pin Differential)

The most fun you can have driving short of a flying a biplane 50' off the ground!  Stiff like it was made out of bridge girder.  You don't drive this car, you strap it on.  Repeals inertia, makes flat 90 degree turns! BRIGHT (like pools of incandescent mercury) Driving Lights come on with high beams: you own a lighthouse.

This car has serious attitude and is a fantastic chick magnet.  Puts a silly grin on people's face until they see it go, then they really get excited.

Accept no substitutes...alas, the "new" BMW faux Mini is a porker, nearly 60% heavier (and safer, more dependable by a mile, gotta be said). This is the older, original Mini-Cooper, a true sports car and *not* a "daily driver".  Like all British sports cars, you must adapt to it and fuss with it, but it's worth it.  If you're any kind of driver, it's guaranteed to plaster an idiot grin across your face, a cross between a car, go-cart and motorcycle.  The only car like is perhaps the Fiat 500 Abarth...but it too is suffering from that automobile manufacturing malady of getting bigger and less agile in successive models.

I originally got it in hopes of intriguing my son into mechanicing as my father had with His Bugattis.  He liked the driving but didn't have a taste for the wrenching.  I passed it on before it broke expensively.  Hail & farewell.

Back to my home page

                  © COPYRIGHT 2002, 2016 Stewart Dean. All of my web pages, photographs and images  included, are copyrighted material! You may NOT copy or use the text, photographs or images without my express permission.