Dino 01628? Is this what it appears to be?

With the tungsten carbide nozzles, about once a year, ceramic nozzles are lucky to last a month. Gloves and new glass for the windows are the biggest maintenance items aside from the wide range of media's needed. When aluminum oxide is the chosen blast media for a specific need, window glass replacement is needed every few days.

Our biggest step forward was with the Vapor Blasting advancement, that eliminating the need for yet another blast cabinet using only plastic, corn cob and walnut shell media's. The investment costs were horrific and the learning curve is very conservatively measured in years, but the results simply cant be duplicated in any other way. I have been working with Lear engineers for a few years to take this process another massive step forward.

Quite frankly all this base prep is a serious PITA but when logistics and the complete lack of being able to find someone willing to do it the way we want 'it', your left with no choice but to invest and do it yourself.

At the risk of 'LawnDart' reading this and thinking I publically complimented him, he has really mastered these tasks, they are no simple undertaking and pure tenacity is the only way to over come this challenge!
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Gorgeous luster, those castings look so fresh, thx for sharing.

I bought a Marelli AEC-103 on ebay but when it arrived I found somebody had "shined it up". These are expensive, even as dead units, so I searched for a way to bring it back; glass bead blasting and vapor blasting were the final contenders and I went with vapor blasting. The luster of the aluminum case was restored and came out great.

 

It really is an impressive technology, but it is not without its own set of challenges and problems to over come, the learning curve is long, expensive and then a good deal more research and testing was needed to figure out how to keep the subject piece looking freshly blasted indefinitely.

It has been long known that dry blasting these castings is wrought with dangers, it took out 2/3s of one years Indy field back in the 80's when someone forgot about that little lesson. Particle embedment on a microscopic level is very hard to detect but its there, just waiting for a casting to get hot, expand and release the embedded glass. I spent a year studying how Rolls Royce developed this technology for maintenance on the turbine power plants and all of the problems they had to over come. That study topic was time well spent as it allowed predictions into what we too would face.

I wasted a lot of time and money trying the develop the soda blasting process to fit our needs but that too failed to provide the results we were looking for and I had to breathe through scuba gear to be anywhere near it. That same blast cabinet has been repurposed many times, each time where it had a scuba tank mounted on the right side of it. Prior to the soda effort, I had turned it into an (almost) air tight argon cabinet for welding blocks and heads with old technology TIG equipment... another One and Done effort that looked better on paper than in practice! "Almost air tight" and breathing argon for hours, demanded the scuba tanks be used for that as well

 

Dave — Enjoyed reading re your find.

Don’t want to pollute this thread with something that is likely unrelated but several years ago I purchased a Dino tool kit, books, and an assortment of parts from a gentleman likely in Arvada (memory is foggy re location). He said they belonged to a relative or friend (again foggy) in Grand Junction. The car had been sold.

Pliers and screwdrivers were missing from the tool kit. I purchased reproductions and sold the then complete kit to a gentleman in Vietnam (with disclosure about the reproductions). I mostly sold the parts and books as well. The parts included door handles, locks and additional misc hardware. I think I still have a quarter window lever and other minor parts sitting around.

Probably unrelated but thought I’d pass this info along. I cant imagine a high number of Dino’s have called Grand Junction home.

If you are interested in seeing pictures of the tool kit or books you can search my name in this forum or under Ferrari Ads. I may have photos on an old computer as well.

Good luck with your research and restoration!

 

Here is a link to tool kit photos. Evidently there were some additional parts I forgot about.

https://www.ferrarichat.com/forum/threads/dino-246-toolkit-plus-other-items-listed-on-ferrariads.415931/#post-142460185