And boys will be boys, will be boys, will be boys...,

If you live in Italy, probably you, or some one in your family owns an Ape. Ape pronounced -op pay- means Bee which is kind of what it sounds like as it whizzes by you on a narrow street. Built by Piaggio, it is a small 50 CC 3 wheeled vehicle, kind of a cross between a motorcycle and a tiny truck and you see it being used to carry everything from flowers, to buckets of paint. I guess you could call it the "Italian work horse". But as with anything, if you have a love of speed, any vehicle is fair game, and racing is a big part of the Mondino family tradition.

One of Massimo's nephews races his tiny truck. (He shall remain nameless, wouldn't want to get him into too much trouble!) He modifies his to make it go faster and than races it against other teens who've modified their own. It is illegal of course and beyond the sheer thrill of going fast and winning the occasional Ape race, there is no reward, unless you take into consideration the enormous grin on his face, and the lit up eyes full of excitement as he tells you about his latest win.

ah satisfaction.., the best reward.

Going Under

This story is not very technical, which is wonderful for non technical me! But it is about one of those things that you just don't expect, and could never imagine happening.
One day a 1986 3.2 Ferrari Mondial came in by tow truck. The owner told my husband that his car was having trouble to start and once it did it idled, but died if you touched the gas.
My husband's first thought was "control box" and he went directly to it's location in the trunk of the car, where everything appeared to be okay. But when he removed the control box cover itself, the problem was instantaneously apparent.

The control box was submerged in water!

Aside from that, nothing else was out of the ordinary. You would think that other things would be soaked, but everything in the trunk on top of the control box was bone dry.
The client later told him that the car had stayed outside during a bad rainstorm. Of course, the drainage for just this scenario , was completely blocked, Murphy's fault.
He took the control box completely out of the car and held it upside down. In the picture you can see the water pouring out of it!

Now here's where the extra mile comes into play. Before replacing the unit and both relays, Massimo also fixed the drainage problem, (not necessarily part of the repair.) ensuring that if the client ever made the mistake of leaving this car outside in wet weather conditions again, there would be no encore.
Sometimes it just takes a little extra effort to do something big as well as nice.

Missing In Action

A client came in with a blown head gasket due to over heating, on a 1985 308 4 valve Ferrari. Massimo pulled the engine out, pulled the heads off, replaced the head gasket and thermostat. He than checked the water pump and looked through the water pump housing pipe as well, everything appeared fine, no leaks..,


So why had it overheated?


Massimo is meticulous and always double checks everything. And on a hunch, he pulled the water pump cover, but again no obvious reason for the trouble, the shaft had no play on the bearing, seals looked recently done, no problems right?


Wrong.


When he tried to turn the shaft by hand the shaft would spin without consistently engaging the gear. In other words the shaft is supposed to be locked onto the gear so that it doesn't move at all! First thing he thought of was that the Woodruff key notch, a piece that sits on the key and fits into a spot on the gear wheel, was completely worn out. But when he pulled the front engine cover off and saw the gear bouncing on the shaft he was intrigued.


Moving? He thought, this thing wasn't suppose to be moving around at all!


After getting down to the Woodruf key itself he saw clearly that there was no notch at all! As you can see in the photo there is nothing attached to the shaft! Instead, the Woodruff key had been pressed in. It is very likely that the shaft came like that from the factory, hard to tell, but because the notch wasn't milled onto the shaft, the water pump circulated sporadically, which in turn caused over heating and finally catastrophic failure.


So Massimo replaced the water pump shaft and the problem was solved.
But he later confided to me that this was really strange and he'd never seen anything like this in all of his years working.

Hello There And Welcome

I've got a husband who always tells me often crazy, but remarkably interesting tales about the automobiles he repairs. My husband's name is Massimo and although I know a lot of you out there are already familier with his work, for those of you who are not, he is an Italian import himself. He specializes in the mechancal repair of exotic automobiles, and more specifically, Ferrari. He has a great love of Italian cars and began his apprentiship when he was 14. He has repaired these cars now, for over 30 years. I think he is as fascinating as the automobiles that he works on and I think you will think so too.

We run a small repair shop in Oldsmar, Florida, called The Auto Legend. He diagnosiss, inspects, troubleshoots and repairs exotic automobiles, and I do mean exotic, some of the vehicles he's repaired in the past are listed as "3", of 3. Meanwhile, I take care of the paper work, run errands, move cars, sometimes help him with repairs when he needs another hand and the rest of the offen essential, somewhat boring background stuff that needs doing on a daily basis. My name is Leah, and I'm Massimo's wife, and although, I'm not a big car person, (I can't tell you makes and models off the top of my head, or who changed what in what year, so bare with me on some of my discriptions for those of you who can!) I do appreciate beauty and I think these cars are exquisite!

The thing is, with our shop if your Ferrari ends up here, it's usually for a perplexing, perhaps detrimental, but always unfixable, problem. Some where, some how, at some moment, someone or something made unwanted changes in a part of the system that affects it's performance and although the car has made the rounds to all the regular mechanic shops AND the dealer, the problem never gets solved.

We're the shop of last resort, and these are our stories.