Name this car....

[ramarren]

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Yes, most cars of that era, be they Italian, German, British, whatever, were built with so little consideration to metal preparation, anti-corrosion measures, and weather proofing it was a travesty.  It is as if the manufacturers just didn't think it was worth bothering about. I saw a Ferrari crumple in half from rust, countless Jaguars so badly rotted the rear suspension arms pulled the mounts off the chassis tub, and Alfas, FIATs, BMWs and even Mercedes with most of the exterior and flooring rusted away ... only five years old! ... when I lived in New York. They simply couldn't survive the roads being salted in winter and the lack of maintenance that were the US norm. (Lots of American cars rusted out then too, but not as quickly or as completely...) 

Probably poor metals available, and certainly zero attention to corrosion resistance until past the middle '70s. Sad. 

My Fulvia was first sold in California in 1967 and spent from '81 to 2002 sitting on a concrete lot in Los Angeles because the engine had a problem and the guy who bought it took iit apart and left it like that. He sold it to the guy I bought it from in Chicago, who never took it out on a rainy day, kept it in a heated garage, and rebuilt it to the 75% level. I bought it from him, have finished the restoration and such, and keep it in a dry garage. After all this time, it needed some minor corrosion repair to the back of the front inner fenders and forward part of the rocker panels in 2023 or so. The rest of its chassis and metal work is completely solid ... I work to keep it that way. It feels tight and solid, all of a piece, like a new car.

G

[ramarren]

BTW: this thread is having problems. I can't use the "like" button, and it seems every time I go to post something to it, it does nothing, then I have to go back to the editor and try again. It brings up my last post in full, and accepts the "Submit Reply" command the second time. ????

G

[wlaidlaw]

I was told that one of the reasons Italian steel from the 50s and 60s was so bad, was that Italy had no native sources of significant amounts of iron ore, neither did it have large quantities of coal or oil. This meant that a high percentage of the content of newly made steel was made from remelted scrap. Now this is fine if it sits for hours in a reverberatory furnace when all the impurities will get burnt off and the scrap raw steel will be wholly integrated with the pig iron to make homogeneous steel. This requires large qualities of gas made from coal and in Italy, this was just too expensive so the process was cut short. The end result is that their steel sheet has a high percentage of impurities called inclusions. These act like a microscopic voltaic battery and lead to rusting from the inside out. I bought what I thought was a new Fiat X1/9. It had holes rusted all the way through the bodywork within 6 months and I had to get my solicitor to write to FIAT to demand they buy it back. We traced the true history of the car, from parts manufacturing dates etc and on running the VIN through the Italian system, we found it had been built as a left hand drive car two years earlier and FIAT admitted it had been stored on grass at an airfield, before going back to Bertone to be converted to RHD. They grudgingly agreed to buy it back at purchase price and I bought a Saab 99 Turbo. 

Wilson