1983 X1/9 Rebuild – A Long Story…. How I came to buy an X1/9 I've finally goen around to chronicling my two year rebuild of a 1983 X1/9 that I saved from the crusher. It was truly a labor of love, heavy emphasis on the labor part. Without the help of many of you on Xwebforums, I would never have completed this challenge. So, I thought I "owed" it to you to take the me to recount my journey in some detail. Its a long post with many pictures. I may get around to posGng it on line but for now, I offer this PDF that you can download and read at your leisure: The first car that I ever owned was a 1967 Ausn Healey Sprite. I bought it in baskets and boxes from a guy in Brooklyn, NY and spent the summer of 1971 learning how cars worked and with the help of a very knowledgeable friend, managed to completely reassemble and restore the Sprite in me to drive it to my sophomore year of college at Notre Dame. The Sprite’s inaugural oung was a 760 mile jaunt west on Interstate 80 in 95 degree heat. Packed in luggage, no radio, no GPS, newly rebuilt engine screaming for hours at 5,000+ RPM with the heater turned on full blast to cool it off - it was a memorable experience. My first NEW car was a 1974 FIAT X1/9. I bought it sight unseen from the one of the few FIAT dealers in New York City and for the first and only me in my life, paid over invoice to guarantee that I would get one of the very first X’s to hit the NY docks. I wish I had the VIN # for the car. I truly believe it was one of if not the first imported to the US. It was dark brown with a tan interior. Aer the Sprite, driving the FIAT from NY to Indiana was like being in a Rolls Royce! I loved that car and a`er a few years began to completely hot rod everything I could. Back then, we had great availability of X1/9 hop up parts and before long I had an AutoX beast that regularly demolished all sorts of MGBs, Spiires, TR-6s, Porsche 914s, and even the occasional 916! Every part of that car and engine had been worked or replaced – twin 42DCNF Webers, magnesium pulleys, ported, polished, shaved head, shot peened, balanced and lightened cranksha, FAZA cam, con rods, you name it – if it was makeable or buyable, it was on that car. It must have been pumping out over 120 HP but as you might expect, the reliability followed the inverse relaonship curve – it was like a Claymore Road Mine! Boom with regularity! Eventually, the rust and rot became so bad that I gave the car to a neighbor kid who had helped me wrench on it and moved on to other toys (1985 Toyota MR2, 1997 Acura NSX) but always maintaining my affinity for mid-engine, agile, top off sports cars that brought a smile to my face. !1 In February of 2013 I was cruising eBay and ran across a 1985 Bertone X1/9 for sale in California. I wasn’t very familiar with the market for X’s so I thought the price was a bargain. I lobbed in what I thought was a “fun” bid, never really intending to buy the car. I came back to my keyboard a bit later to see “congrats – you are the winning bidder”! It was a bit of an “oh S**T” moment. I had just bought a new 2013 Ford Focus ST and had no room le in my 3 car garage. Nonetheless, I was commied. I started shopping around for a shipper and ended up engaging UShip for a very reasonable price ($550). A couple of weeks later the car showed up and I began a 3 month stem to stern work over to make sure everything was right. Naturally, I found lots of things that needed fixing, improving, replacing, etc. but fundamentally; the car was really sound and performed quite well. Wrenching on an X again a`er almost 30 years required climbing the learning curve all over again. So many things that used to be second nature had to be “rediscovered”. I quickly learned that 60 year old hands and wrists don’t arculate quite as easily as did 18 year old ones. And since FIAT chose put all sorts of nuts and bolts in places that humans were not meant to access, I had to figure out whole new ways to do what used to be easy tasks. But with persistence, hard work, me and the help of many of you on Xwebforums I got through it all and brought the 85X to a fine state of reliability and performance. My plan was to simply enjoy driving the car on occasion. That worked for a few months. !2 How I came to buy ANOTHER X1/9 In August of 2013, I saw an ad in the Ausn, TX Craigslist for a 1983 Bertone X1/9 for sale. The car looked “OK” in the pictures. On a whim, I called the seller and introduced myself as a fellow X1/9 owner nearby and suggested that perhaps, Craigslist was not the best place to sell the car. I offered to help her post it on eBay and Xweb and told her I would come by to look at the car first. It was really mostly idle curiosity and the desire to see another X1/9. The next Saturday, my wife and I took a 25 mile drive to see the car. From a distance, it looked fine – up close was a different story. I crawled all under and over it and took it for a quick test drive around the block before telling the seller (a woman) that the car needed a LOT of work. I again offered to help her find a buyer but she insisted she just “wanted the car gone” and if I wouldn’t buy it, she was going to call a wrecker to haul it off! Well, all you X-heads know I wasn’t going to let THAT happen. So a`er some limited haggling, I handed her a check for $800, loaded a bunch of random parts into my Focus and had my wife follow me home. The car had been in her family since they purchased it new and I was pleasantly surprised to be handed an enre history of the car’s service records dang back to the original bill of sale: Ausn in late August is not the coolest place on earth. The car overheated every few of miles so we began a slow process of gas staon hopping our way home. My wife was prey supporve and understanding through the first two cool down stops but by the third, I could tell it was beginning to wear thin – I am prey percepve that way! Anyway, we made it home and thus my tale begins ….. I parked my new acquision in the driveway, gave her a much need bath, cleared a spot in my garage and began a full assessment. From a distance, the car looked respectable. !3 Up close, the reality was not prey. The car was badly rusted in all the typical spots and few not so typical. The windshield frame must have rusted through years ago allowing water to find its way into the interior. The floors were rusted out and had been poorly patched from the boom with layers of overlapping sheet metal and dozens of pop rivets and sheet metal screws and some kind of nasty adhesive. The rear trunks and rear corners were shot. The trunk boom pan itself was badly rusted. Wheel well interiors were rusted through, rocker panels had holes and in general, every single body panel had been dinged or dented. The rear trunk lid had several depressions and holes from a former luggage rack. The front lid looked like it had been in a hail storm and was badly bent at the “wings” – probably from someone trying to li it up when it was locked. The cables and locks were either missing or broken. The dash was badly cracked in several places. The steering rack was clunking, the wheels were mismatched and the res shot. The heater hoses had been cut and plugged so I suspected the core was leaking. AC was in place but not hooked up. I already knew the cooling system was toast and clearly, there was something wrong with the fuel injecon system. Electrically, nothing worked. Cut wires all over the place indicated a short that was never found. Instruments were spoy – tach, speedo inoperave, etc. !4 Oddly, the top of the windshield and the middle of the targa roll bar were set with a series of snaps – it appeared that the PO had installed a cloth top. Aside from that, the car looked great! !5 BODY While I’ve always been a fairly good mechanic, I had never amempted metal or body work. It was obvious that I was going to have to learn! I set about the task of educang myself on the primaries of body work. I absorbed a few YouTube videos and then visited a body supply shop in Ausn. Sanding blocks, body puy, various grades of sand paper, hammer and dolly, etc. in hand, I went to Harbor Freight to pick up some power tools (angle grinder, sander, cheap welding rig, etc.).