Dennison Visit 5/29/19

I had hoped that the coupe would come back from the blast people before I had my foot surgery as I would be unable to drive for 3 weeks or so.  However that did not happen.  Of course, the day after my surgery, they got the car back.  However, my friend George Smith (PF coupe owner), had asked to accompany me to Butch's shop the next time I went down.  So I asked if he wanted to be a designated driver before I could drive.  He said yes, so we made the hour trip down to Puyallup to see the car.

Darren, Buthch's parts and paint specialist, said that he had seen worse on the body.  I was using a knee scooter as I can not have any weight bearing on my right foot, so I have limited mobility, particularly when there are cars like a 250 GTO (real, not replica) in the shop too.  Probably don't want to run into that car with the scooter.  The side I first could see looked pretty good.  A few dings around the nose, but no too bad.

Then I rolled around to the back.  The left wheel well had not been replaced and there were a bunch of rust holes in the corner.  The right side had been replaced, but they didn't do a good job on welding the panel in.  But the inner fender panel on that side hadn't been replaced and was also full of pin holes.

The right fender must have taken a hit at some point as there were numerous dents there, but nothing that can't be dollied out.

They had sent the door window surrounds out to be stripped and then just copper plated while they fit everything together.  The passenger door is together while the driver's door is still being worked on.  After everything fits well, it gets taken apart for chroming and put back together after the car has been painted.  The door hinges and pins were well worn as the rear of the driver's door could be lifted 1/4" or so.  The hinges have been reamed out so oversized pins fit properly.

My engine is off the dynamometer, but we did visit the dyno room.  It's a blast proof room with a bullet proof window that has all of the controls outside in case an engine explodes.  The middle picture is the water tower.  They continuously run tap water through the engine and don't try to cool it.  You can see new mounts on the floor.  Someone in the area is building a 1000+ horsepower engine and the torque was lifting the original floor brackets.

I did get copies of the dyno run.  The engine gave a max horsepower of 223.1 @ 6800 RPM. The torque peaked at 193.9 ft-lbs @ 5400 RPM.  Of course, this is on the engine dynamometer, so no driveline loss.  After the car is done, they will run it on the rolling dyno to measure at the rear wheels.  On Run 1, they only took the revs to 6600, while on Run 2, up to 7000.  Ferrari claimed 235 horsepower at 7000 RPM for the 250 GTE which used the 128Fsame engine as the Series 2 PF coupes.

This was a short visit as my foot was starting to hurt from not being horizontal.