[alfa] Re: Acronyms and initials and Russian rust

[George Graves <gmgraves@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

First off, thanks for The Skinner Union 'skinny'.  Now on to rusty cars
and Soviet Bloc steel.

Any steel car body will rust if not protected. If you media blast a
steel body down to bare metal and leave it overnight, you will find a
fine fuzz of rust on the surface the next AM. That's why restorers want
to get a coat of primer on a car as soon as possible even if some of
the body panels need repair. They will perform the repairs on a primed
surface. For a long time, the Italians (for reasons lost to time) put
no corrosion protection on their autos other than the paint. Often, the
undersides were left totally untreated and stone chips in the paint
abided by salt on the winter roads in places where they did that,
resulted in cars rusting away before their owner's very eyes. Add to
this the fact that the enamel paints used up through the 60's weren't
very good and you have a recipe for disaster. But in the '60's and
'70's the Italian government was dominated by Communists. It's this
Communist government who made deals with Soviet Bloc nations to
exchange trade goods. One of the "fruits" of these collaborations was
that Fiat got to sell the rights and know-how to allow various Soviet
countries to build obsolete Fiat models under license. The Russkies
built Fiats and called them Moskvitch, The Poles built Fiats and
called them "Polonaise", the Czechs built Fiats and called them Skodas
(for a while), and the Yugoslavs, built Fiats and.... well, you get the
picture.

As a trading "partner' with the Soviet Bloc, Italy got to buy Socialist
steel at "favored nation" prices. Unfortunately, Steel from Iron
Curtain countries was high in sulfur, had high oxygen content and was
very porous. Result? Cars that even using the best quality steel, were
prone to rust due to the manufacturing processes of the time, and
making them out of steel so poor in quality that it self-corroded
independent of outside influences made a bad situation even worse.

George Graves
GTV-6


On Jan 10, 2004, at 9:42 AM, alfa-digest wrote:

> Date: Sat, 10 Jan 2004 00:29:43 -0500
> From: "John Hertzman" <johnhertzman@domain.elided>
> Subject: [alfa] Acronyms and initials  and Russian rust
>
> The Star automobile which George Herbert Skinner bought in France in
> 1903 (leading to the new SU carburetter) was probably Italian; there
> may have been other Stars (just as there were other Alfas) but one
> Star was the Societa Torinese Automobili Rapid, one of the several,
> mostly acronymed, makes associated with the brothers Ceirano  Spa,
> the Societa Piemontese Automobili; Scat, the Societa Ceirano
> Automobili Torino, and of course Fiat. Which is mainly to say that the
> seriously acronym-averse may be handicapped in the world of automobili
> Italiani. Alfa was undoubtedly the best known long-lived acronym after
> Fiat, but its predecessor company Siad shared the 'S' list with the
> Siac, Sial, Siam (twice; two companies in different decades), Siata,
> Sic, Sidea, Silva, Sima, Sims, Siva, Sive,, Smig, Smim, Stae, and Sva
> as well as the previously mentioned Star, Spa, and Scat.
>
> FWIW, I am extremely skeptical about the "Russian Steel" story. The
> worst rust, by far, that I have seen on Italian carbodies dates from
> the earlier period when the low-production, artisanal industry was
> fumbling a transition from one-at-a-time handwork, frequently in
> Aluminum, to assembling pressed steel panels which were punched out at
> a rate far higher than finished sales, resulting in long storage of
> unpainted unassembled panels and/or stashes of assembled but
> unfinished bodies in less than ideal storage conditions. I can't prove
> the numbers, but the hundred or so Arnolt-MGs which Bertone built over
> a two year period, (through early 1955) in aluminum, apparently had
> nothing like the problems which plagued the earliest
> pressed-steel-paneled Giulietta Sprints which Bertone built starting
> in 1955  same workers, same management, but an unfamiliar material
> and processes. A terminally rusted 1956 Sprint which I parted-out
> still showed unpainted bare steel behind the headliner. Similarly the
> largely handmade aluminum shell of a 1956 Touring 1900 coupe I had was
> in relatively good shape compared to the horrendously rusted 1962 2000
> Spider I have which was nominally also built by Touring but assembled
> from steel panels pressed by Ilca. It is easy, and tempting, to
> scapegoat tools, materials, the government, the unions, or anything
> but inexperience, ignorance or expedience; Russian steel may not have
> been the best, but I doubt that Swedish steel, or American, or German,
> or Korean, would have fared much better in the same places and the
> same times.
>
> Cheers
>
> John H.
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