Monday, November 26, 2012

Keeping it Stock?

Briefly, I want to build on my recent post about the history of the Fiat group (Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Lancia, etc.), and their innovative spirit...

Andy and the VAS Turbo X1/9 w/ Programmable EFI
I often hear from customers who want to keep their cars stock. Upon further probing, I find that most are concerned about retaining resale value. However, as someone who deals with these cars for a living, I can tell you with certainty that tasteful modifications will significantly increase the resale value of most of these cars.

For the few who are concerned about nostalgic appeal, and want to keep their cars stock for the sake of honoring the legacy of those who designed and built it... See below! Fiat, Alfa Romeo, and Lancia have always been modifiers and innovators!

The bottom line is: Do you have a one-off X1/9 that Nuccio Bertone custom-built for his wife, with a hand-peened impression of her face in the left-front fender, and form-fit seats made of her favorite small animal hide? Okay, keep it "stock"... But if you have Nuccio Bertone's beautiful design legacy as represented in the factory production Fiat X1/9, honor the man's genius and...


Make it yours!

Aaron

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Thoughts On Fiat

Hey friends!

I've been busy with a ton of new projects. I have some very exciting things in the works for my fellow enthusiasts, and this kind of progress has got me thinking. I thought I would share some brief thoughts that might help owners understand where we are coming from with some of our new offerings...

The Fiat Group Legacy

Fiat has always been a forward thinking company. They continually push existing technological boundaries to increase performance and reliability by utilizing brand new designs and pioneering advances, even despite the costs incurred to themselves. For this reason, they enlisted the help of other forward thinkers, like Karl Abarth, the Pininfarina design house, and engine designer Aurelio Lampredi.

Fiat revolutionized the automotive industry with the utilization of Aurelio Lampredi's belt-driven timing, dual overhead cam four cylinder in the Fiat 124. Rather than continue with the familiar, proven, and inexpensive pushrod motors used in economy cars of the time, they chose to press forward with a much better design. The Lampredi DOHC was produced, in various forms, all the way through 1999, and became the inspiration for numerous Japanese motors, which are generally renowned for reliability and power-per-displacement.

During development of the 124 Sport Spider, Fiat chose the bold design put forward by American-born, then-Pininfarina-designer Tom Tjaarda. The body style was years ahead of its time, and particularly unusual in a '60s European budget-priced automobile, where the right-angle was the favored styling cue, and the Euro-box the almost universal result.

When Fiat wanted a competitive rally car, they called upon long-time partner and forward-thinker Karl Abarth. Abarth and his team went to work retrofitting the 124 Spider with modern features such as independent rear suspension, a custom cast 16 valve cylinder head, and redesigned front suspension. He didn't keep it stock, he took it forward. And he made it competitive.

Keeping in Step

I am very proud to be a part of the Vick Autosports family, where we have followed in Fiat group's innovative footsteps, especially since it is their exceptional cars which we offer support for. This same creativity, forward thinking, and engineering prowess has brought you advances like VAS Programmable Fuel Injection kits, VAS Improvement Brakes for Fiat 124, and Prima 3 Tubular Control Arms for Fiat 124. I'm confident that, if they'd had technology like this available to them when they designed great cars like the Fiat and Alfa Spiders, the Fiat X1/9, the Lancia Beta/Scorpion, etc., they would have used it! Why am I so confident?

Because they use these technologies today!

Aaron

Monday, October 15, 2012

That... Is a Lot of Wheels

As you can probably tell, our first shipment from world famous wheel manufacturer XXR just came in!

I have to say, I'm kind of proud right now. These custom cut wheels were the fruit of my long talks with XXR which ended in them signing us up as their exclusive dealer for vintage Fiat and Alfa wheels.

Now, before anybody has a chance to get the assumption hamster cranking on its wheel, and starts accusing us of using our "Wal-Mart like buying power" to create a wheel monopoly, let me first say... LOL. We are not some nameless, faceless money machine; we are real Fiat enthusiasts. We had to go in on these wheels, and go in deep, for you our fellow collectors. I hope you feel appreciated, y'are!

We're all ecstatic about these wheels, but we have a lot of work to do, so all your pre-ordered sets will be shipping throughout this week.

Aaron

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Real World Compression Ratios

From Andy,

There has been a lot of talk about compression ratios and how much is too much. I've done extensive research and built numerous motors, and would like to offer the following as a guide to the mysterious compression ratio.

Andy's Comprehensive Compendium on Compression


Compression ratios can be understood in two different ways: static compression and functional compression. Static compression is based ONLY on cylinder volume versus crankshaft movement. Static compression is fairly easy to determine. Functional compression accounts for cylinder volume, crankshaft movement, AND valve opening. This is how you figure "real world" compression numbers. Because air flows differently into a cylinder at different RPM's, it is very difficult to know your functional compression ratio at every point in the RPM range.

Friday, September 14, 2012

Taking Your Car to a Shop?

From Jerry,

Are you taking your car to a shop? Read this first.

We have the pleasure of selling to a number of reputable shops that have long-established expertise working on Italian cars. Sadly, not all shops fall in this category.

Getting any modern car repaired correctly can be a challenge these days. With overall repair work down over the past few years, most shops are on a very tight budget. The challenge is even greater, of course, when trying to get your vintage Italian car repaired quickly. Expertise in repairing Italian cars was almost non existent in most shops even 30 or so years ago, when your car was new. Certainly, it's much less available since most shops haven't seen an Italian car in their service bay in many, many years.

Many shops do not have experienced mechanics to diagnose or repair your car. In fact, most do not even have a factory shop manual at their disposal.

So our first recommendation in taking your car to a shop is to provide them your Fiat 124 Factory Shop Manual or Fiat X1/9 Factory Shop Manual. Don’t confuse a Chilton, Clymer, or Haynes manual with the factory shop manual. The factory manual is far more thorough, accurate, and is often considerably easier to understand.

If you don’t have one, get one!

See the “Manuals” section of our catalogs or type “manual” in the search window of our online store to find them. And never rely on dubious Internet message board advice. It isn’t “free” if it costs you time, money, and frustration in unnecessary repairs.
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Here's a story that might shed light on what some of our customers encounter when they take a car to the shop. Many of you know Matt. You will very often hear his voice when you give us a call. Matt recently got a parts order from a long-time customer who was planning to take the his special car plus the parts ordered to a shop he trusted. A couple of days later Matt got a call from a shop pricing the same exact parts Matt had previously sold to our customer. Hmmm...

Maybe you have guessed what happened next. Sure enough, our customer called a few days later to ask Matt about returning most of the parts we had supplied because his shop told him they wouldn’t fit. He also told Matt his shop had found proper replacement parts. You can imagine the shock when Matt confirmed the shop that had phoned us was indeed the same shop our customer was using and that the shop was ordering the same parts from us. Why would a shop do this? It is because the shop wanted to make additional money selling parts to the customer. No doubt when billing the customer, the shop would have informed our customer the proper parts were available but only at a premium cost. How do we know this? Because we see this ugly scenario played out several times a year.

Here is a helpful hint: Don’t go to the cheapest mechanic you can find. As a general rule, you get what you pay for. And sometimes that low dollar bid becomes a high dollar headache or you!

Here is another true story. Recently we sold a rebuilt transmission to a customer, who after paying a shop to have it installed, informed us the unit was impossible to shift. After consultation, we instructed the customer to send us the transmission for inspection. Andy, our mechanic, was stunned to find many of the components destroyed. The conclusion was simple: The transmission had been run dry. That’s right. The shop failed to fill it with the GL1 gear oil that was supplied with the unit. It had been run without the benefit of lubrication. It was also discovered a number of other components sold to the customer and delivered to the customer’s shop were not installed. To this day the whereabouts of these additional parts is unknown to anyone except those working at the shop.
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Here is a helpful hint: require your shop to do like our shop, and other reputable shops do. All removed parts should be kept and presented to the customer upon completion of the work. Here is an example: If the water pump was supposed to have been replaced, there should be a dingy, used one in the box of discarded parts.

Another issue is diagnosis. This is an issue as old as the auto repair business. Out of a lack of knowledge or out of frustration, some shops believe in what we call “throwing parts at the problem”. This last summer a customer took his car to a shop because his brakes were failing. New hoses, calipers and a master cylinder were all installed. Still the brakes were failing. The customer used our tech line to call us to ask if we had an idea what was wrong. In the course of asking questions we inquired if there were any puddles under the car. He answered ’yes’, there was a constant puddle on his garage floor under the center of the car. We diagnosed over the phone what any mechanic should have easily seen when looking at the car on a rack: a worn out, leaky brake compensator was the problem. Of course, the customer paid the shop as the work progressed, every unnecessary step of the way.

Other problems many shops often misdiagnose are electrical in nature, such as those relating to ignition switches and fuel pumps.

Again, we have the pleasure of selling to a number of reputable shops that have long-established expertise working on Italian cars, and can give recommendations local to you if you give us a call. Please be cautious when finding a shop and use common sense when dealing with them.

Jerry

Monday, September 10, 2012

My Fiat 124 Thermostat Goes Which Way?!

From Matt,

First things first, if you have a unit that looks like the one pictured above, then the tube on the left side of the picture is the one that goes to the lower radiator tube.

However, regularly, we get calls that a thermostat is bad out of the box.  99% of the time this is not true! The fact is, the Fiat 124 coolant system is hard to fill correctly, since the high point is the hose above the back of the cylinder head.

At Vick Auto, we have the fix.  A coolant burp/flush kit for Fiat 124 (Spider, Coupe, etc.) is the best answer to the pesky air bubble issue in a Fiat 124.

As you can see in the picture, the burp/flush kit is easily installed in the upper heater hose that passes over the exhaust cam. At Vick Auto, we try to have these in stock at all times as it is the best way to get rid of air in the coolant system.  Our instructions for filling your coolant system with one of these kits are as follows...

  1. Install burp/flush kit
  2. Open heater valve to ensure coolant fills the heater core
  3. With the caps off of the burp/flush kit AND the radiator, begin filling the system from the radiator cap
  4. Once you can no longer fill into the radiator directly, move to the burp kit cap and begin filling from there. DO NOT PUT THE CAP ON THE RADIATOR, YET
  5. You will see bubbles and some fluid poor out of the radiator, this is to be expected.  Once the bubbles stop, put the cap on the radiator. DO NOT CAP THE burp kit
  6. Fill more into the burp kit while slowly and gently squeezing the upper radiator hoses. This is to help suck fluid into the cylinder head
  7. When no more fluid can go into the burp kit, place the cap on it
  8. Now that all the caps are in place squeeze the lower radiator to thermostat hose rapidly and hard about a dozen times. This is to disperse and clear out any air bubbles at the thermostat or just in the lower motor
  9. Open the cap on the burp kit once again you may see it is empty, that is to be expected.  Simply fill it up until it can take no more while gently squeezing the upper radiator hoses
  10. You should almost be done!  DO NOT GO FOR A JOY RIDE YET
  11. Start your car and let it reach operating temperature to ensure that the fan comes on once the motor is warm.  Be aware some water temp sensors and dash gauges may actually be wrong (as much as +/-30 degrees!).  A good infrared thermostat is a wise investment to get accurate temps
  12. IF YOUR FAN NEVER COMES ON AND THE CAR BEGINS TO OVERHEAT, SHUT DOWN IMMEDIATELY. This means you have a failure of either the fan, fan switch, thermostat, or an air bubble in the system. If you have just replaced the thermostat and the fan switch you can almost certainly rule those out
I hope this walk-through and the pointers above will help everyone have a safe and easy thermostat swap in the future. If you have not picked up new parts yet, you may want to do this before you start. At the Vick Auto shop, we carry everything you need.

Remember, the faster you get a job finished, the better your chances of failure may be.

Matt

Friday, September 7, 2012

Italian Car Fest




From Jerry,

Today, I checked my 1978 Lancia Beta Coupe over in preparation for ItalianCarFest (affectionately known here as "ICF"). ICF is one of the highlights of the year for those of us at Vick Autosports.

It began with the Italian Car Club of the Southwest (ICCS). It was my privilege to organize the club at the request of our company’s first owner, Robert Vick. Of course, this was long before I bought Vick Autosports. The club was originally formed as the Fiat Club of North Texas and later grew into the ICCS. But that’s another story...

Anyway, ICF began in 2003. The first show was at Cross Timbers Winery, a lovely setting in Grapevine. Since then, the show moved to Lake Grapevine, and later to its current home at Nash Farm, an early twentieth century living-history farm.

Without question, the most exciting element of ICF is that it is open to the general public. It's wonderful to show off the joys of Italian cars and two-wheelers to those who are not familiar with them. To date, over 40,000 people have attended the annual event. A rain storm put a damper on one year’s event, and the show has gone on despite two droughts that made the grassy display area iffy. Of note, for the first year (scheduled at the lakefront), the club watered the field for a month beforehand, utilizing a water buffalo (a 500 gallon tank) towed behind volunteers’ trucks!

The club was wise in organizing ICF in conjunction with a well established regional event, Grapefest. The two events compliment each other. The City of Grapevine has been generous in assisting ICCS with ICF. And Vick Autosports (VAS) has helped out, too. VAS is the “Senior Sponsor” of ICF and is the only company to have sponsored ICF every year.

Vick Autosports appreciates the effort of the current organizers to make ICF an event unmatched in the region!

It is with this in mind that I give the Beta Coupe an inspection. The car hasn’t been driven much lately. It has gotten dusty in the garage. It will be on the show field and although not up for judging, I want it to be presentable...

Jerry

Thursday, September 6, 2012

The Family

So, this is a family business. No, not just a business owned by someone who has a family somewhere, and employs people they know little-to-nothing about. This is actually a business where everyone who works here happens to be part of the same immediate family.

I think that's pretty cool. But my favorite part is the way we each have our particular strengths and skill sets that round out the perfect team.
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Jerry - the Boss (a.k.a. "dad")

Jerry owns the place, and keeps the books. For most of his life, he's been an small business owner and entrepreneur, sticking it to the man with the best of them.

He's also responsible for getting us all into Fiats in the first place, which seems to make up for some of his other faults.

Before taking the reigns at Vick, Jerry also founded Italian Car Club of the Southwest, volunteering extensively and serving multiple terms as President by popular vote. He was also instrumental in organizing our local Italian Car Fest, which has been a hugely popular, fun show for all fine Italian autos.

Jerry has owned too many Fiats and Lancias to count. 
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Andy - brother #1

Andy is the eldest of the younger generation of Vick'ers, and the mechanic here. Don't get me wrong, he's not exactly young, but he can spin wrenches and design parts with the best of them. His broad, inclusive study in automotive engineering includes time at the world's premier Ferrari performance shop, after all.

Years of Vick's SCCA Fiat racing experience and Andy's sharp automotive wit come together in our award-winning performance motors. None of the other Guys can even touch them on the track. He's also the mind and muscle behind many of our other performance parts, including our Programmable Fuel Injection Kit and Fuel Injected Individual Throttle Bodies for Fiat DOHCs.
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Matt - brother #2

Matt has had a lot of experience with customer service and management, and does a fine job of both. If you call us, there's a good chance you'll get him. Be nice to him, because he's very helpful and knows a lot about these cars.

He keeps stuff on our shelves, and has most of our part numbers memorized. It's creepy, really.

Matt's first car was a '76 Fiat 124 Spider, and our introduction to the wonderful world of Fiat. If we had known then what we know now, we probably would have started with a cleaner restoration candidate. But, hey, that car was a learning experience... every other stinking day. That said, the red-orange '76 Killer Tomato started our study into what it takes to make a Fiat into the reliable Japanese car dominator it should still be.
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Aaron - brother #3

I come from an engineering background, and have been designing products and  electronics for years. I spend a lot of my time coming up with new parts and upgrades for these great cars.

I am very happily married, with two adorable children and number three on the way. My wife is very supportive of my Fiat hobby, which I understand is pretty rare among women. She's awesome.

My first car was a comically modified '84 Fiat X1/9 that Jerry bought out of a fellow's back forty for $800, before I even had my license. Complete with a faded rattle-can-red paint job, trailer hitch on the aluminum rear bumper, and extensive body damage in the shape of buttocks; the price was right! This car took about 15 minutes to get running, and about 15 months to get looking good. Dad and I spent hours upon hours working the cheek-prints and dings out of the body, followed by a visit to the car club's professional paint booth where he applied the final coats himself. I still own and love this car, which contains the very first VAS Performance Radiator for Fiat X1/9.

VAS - The next generation

Thanks for reading.

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Same Ole Story, Brand New Blog


Hello, my name is Aaron, and I work at Vick Autosports.

I love my job, and the people I work with, so I decided to start a blog and write about it. This place is actually pretty interesting, as I think you'll find. Read on!

What can you expect from this blog?

  • Tech advice
  • Tips
  • Anecdotes
  • Fish stories
  • News
  • Posts from the whole family
  • Some awesome cars
  • And quite a few surprises