milano chassis stiffeners, patents, and vibrations

[PeteLaurel@domain.elided]

I am a little behind on AD's, so excuse me if this has been covered.

1. As for a Milano chassis stiffener, Zamani, I would be interested too IF it 
does not eliminate the four door usefullness of the car. Email me offline if 
you're still interested.

2. I worked at a large material science company, Raychem, for about eight 
years in product development and marketing. There were some AD exchanges 
regarding Don Erimas (sorry about the bad spelling), and here are my 
unsolicited two cents. Patents aside, when someone develops a product they 
try to recoup the development costs in the prices of the products. Although 
one can copy the design, chances are you'll never know what was rejected by 
the designers, and what manufacturing secrets are hidden -- not darkly but 
simply in the course of making it -- and you therefore expose yourself to 
producing an inferior product. On the patent hand, only composition of matter 
patents are really strong. A design patent can always be designed around. 
This is not legalese, but business. In business school we studied a Harvard 
Business Review case study of Cannon. They got copies of all of Xerox's 
copier patents, locked some engineers away for three years with the mission 
to make copiers from the patents. Then Cannon made copiers that did not use 
the intellectual property covered by the Xerox patents. For what it is worth, 
with Alfa's it is usually easier in the long run to buy from a reputable 
source. But if the product does not exist, then I am all for making one on my 
own.

3. As for driveline vibrations on a Milano, I think our Platinum is making 
noises. Not really a vibration caused by a new harmonic, but a rattling. I 
crawled under the car an wiggeld the shaft from the motor to the transaxle 
and all seemed fine, but I was wonding what sort of troubleshooting I can do 
to see if something is tired/wearing out/falling off. The car has 72k miles 
on it, and the first 60k were very gentle.

Regards,
Peter Lundquist
SF Bay Area
'69 GTV
'87 Milano

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