Part 2: The First Six Months

Previously on My Fiat 600D
Part 1: The Car – Before I Bought It

And now, it’s time to get to know the car I just bought over the internet.

Work on the 600D started on April 11th, 2008.  The first thing I did was take out all the four or five USPS mail boxes that the interior and trim bits came in.  Then I crawled all over it, to getting familiar with my new car.  🙂

Over the next couple of days I put the coil and voltage regulator back in their proper place and performed the usual maintenance procedures people do after purchasing an old, used car with unknown maintenance history:  changed the oil, cleaned out the centrifugal oil filter, checked the spark plugs, flushed and changed the coolant, put new gas in the tank, bled the brakes, checked the transaxle fluid level, and checked to see if the lights worked.  All especially important when buying a car over the internet sight unseen.

I turned the key and… it started right up!  The sound was both awesome and horrible.  Awesome because it’s a little Fiat motor making a little Fiat motor sound through a sweet header/muffler.  Horrible because it was running like garbage.

I put it out on the road anyway and over the next couple of months it ran better and better then more I drove it.  I put Marvel Mystery Oil in it to help loosen the sticky valves.  I replaced the points, vacuum advance, cap, and rotor on the distributor.  The single biggest difference was replacing the spark plug wires, though. At this point, I also added the oil pressure sender and gauge from a Fiat 850.  It’s the only gauge I had in the car all summer.  🙂  Surprisingly good oil pressure, too.

During October, the headgasket blew.  Besides ordering a new headgasket, I took that time to have the head cleaned and decked and painted the valve cover and filter canister cover.  It doesn’t have very many miles on it according to the odometer (which is still packed away in one of those USPS boxes) and you can see the nice cross-hatching on the cylinder walls in the picture below.

 

It was running very well by now, but I like to tinker and modify.  So, my first modification was to swap out the 600’s distributor with one from an 850.  I had already taken the 850’s distributor’s points out and replaced them with an optical trigger system from Crane Cams (discontinued), but now made by FAST.

The 600s came with either a Solex carb or a Weber 28 ICP carb.  Mine came with the Solex, which are hard to find parts for. So, I bought a 4-pack of the Webers on eBay to swap it out with eventually. I took them apart and made one good 28 ICP 1 and then rebuilt it.  I scanned the Weber 28 ICP Service Manual and made it available to download on my Manuals page.

Swapping the carb out was the last thing I did before parking the car for the rainy season.

There’s a good quarter inch of oil and road grime covering the leaky transaxle and engine. You’ll see this remedied in a later post. The the shiny, rebuilt Weber really sticks out.

Next up:  Undercarriage restoration!

If you have any questions or comments, contact me using the contact page or email me at myfiat600d@gmail.com.  Cheers.