Leela Motors

The donor car

In the early 90’s I had an ’85 Alfa Romeo GTV6. Looks aside it had all the things I was looking for in a car: great handling, a sound that R & T called the best they had ever tested, a nice tan leather interior, sunroof, lowered, with a sport exhaust. Complex enough to satisfy my love of mechanical things, it had a rear transaxle, de Dion suspension, in-board disc brakes at the back, all aluminum motor, and it felt right. This is something the Italians know how to do so well. I added a limited slip differential to it, and made the front camber adjustable. Hats off to the Italians. I think they are the only nation in the world where a government owned company (Alfa) at the time, could produce a 4 door sedan and a GT Veloce with all this running gear at a relatively reasonable price.

Due to the de Dion rear end the track could not be changed. The wheelbase however I set at 93.5 inches. The wheels most suited for the car were 17”x 7.5” from England and 40 series tires.

Laying on it’s side in the back yard carefully placed between the almond and fig tree was a Silver Alfa Milano donor car from which I took parts out as I need them. This gave my wife the opportunity to appreciate the bottom side of Italian mechanical genius for the better part of a year and a half while doing dishes in the kitchen. Some people don’t know how lucky they are! It also gave Jesse Z. the previous owner of the Milano a chance to unload one of his 3 Alfas that my enthusiasm got him to buy. Everybody wins! I hope this Karma gets spread around…

The Chassis

Slowly I placed all the components out on the floor of the shop blocking them up to their appropriate heights with 4 x 4’s, 2 x 4’s and shims. Suspension set the right distance apart. The engine is really tall with the deep, 8 quart, finned oil pan hanging precariously close to the road. Got to have enough clearance here or disaster, and it has to come back from the centerline of the front wheels for weight distribution. The transaxle is really long and it is all forward of the rear wheels. Good for weight distribution but bad for seating space in the cabin. Compounding this is the special shift linkage they came up with to take out the slop in the shifter that was a problem in earlier Alfetta models. It takes up a lot of room and currently touches the back of the driver’s seat. It works out that there is just enough room for me (I’m 6 ft. tall), but taller people have difficulty. This linkage will ultimately be replaced with the earlier design because due to the shorter wheelbase and the engine moving some 14” back a lot of tubing was cut out of the shifter making it much stiffer.

Once all the running gear and suspension was in place, it was time to lay out the chassis. This was done with pieces of 2 x 2 douglas fir, hot glued and screwed together. I loosely followed some of the design theme of the TZ1 chassis, as I liked the horizontal members behind the engine for safety. The rest is designed to fit around components with as few a number of tubes as possible each tube serving to mount as many components as possible. The passenger compartment is surrounded by a deep chassis for strength and while #001 doesn’t have 3D side impact protection, there is room to add it. The chassis is still very strong with the top rail being at elbow height when sitting in the car.

The Body

So starting with these dimensions I sculpted the model for the car out of modeling clay at 1/5 scale. This allowed experimentation with different design features. This was followed by a ¼ scale urethane foam model in 1” slices. This was dimensionally correct to be tall enough to clear the motor and yet be 6” off the ground, etc. making sure the seats were in the right position to clear the transaxle and still have enough room for feet and pedals. Some of this was guess work as we went, some actually measured out.  Half the fun is solving problems as they arise and coming up with a good solution. For every hour of work that went in the car probably 10 or 12 were spent thinking about how and what to do.

The foam model was only half of the car. Once the foam was shaped the individual slices were scanned, mirror imaged and blown up 4 times; printed out on large roller paper, glued to plywood and band sawed out. Mounted on a flat table and twin backbones the stations were secured. Stringers were then used as splines to fare the stations and get the right curves. Once the stringers were in place the ‘buck’ was located on the chassis, which was a running chassis at this point, to check clearances to the tires and top of the engine. Some things you can make errors on and fix later, not having a tall enough or wide enough body would really suck. No mistakes here.

Finishing the buck is a lot of work and took a long time….(see photos), but eventually it was ready to make molds and composite body parts. These are two layers of glass with Sorex in between making  light but very strong body panels. To avoid making one big mold which would be hard to store, I decided on three molds. This had the advantage of the hood and trunk being completely separate and removable for easy access to service the car and a lot easier to move around and store.