1974 Fiat 124 Spider: perpetual project

Figured I’d post the story of my 1974 Fiat 124 Spider in here. It’s not much of a build, just an ongoing project.

I was lucky enough to drive around this beautiful Alfa Romeo Spider for most of the summer of 2021:


I knew I needed something like it for myself. Only issue is that vintage Italian sports cars tend to be pretty expensive, which is a big roadblock for a kid in high school. So I waited for a deal and ended up buying this Fiat Spider in October of 2021:


I somehow purchased it for $6,000, which is pretty cheap for one of these. A little about Fiat 124s if you don’t know much:

Designed originally in 1966 and sold until 1984, it’s got four wheel disc brakes, 5 speed transmission with overdrive, independent suspension with coil springs, and most importantly: an engine designed by famous Italian engineer Aurelio Lampredi.

In the mid 60s, Fiat paid Lampredi to design the “Lampredi Twin Cam”, a competition engine for use in rally cars. However, they ran out of money to design an engine for the road cars. So they just de-tuned the racing engine and stuck it in. Even in the road cars, it’s got dual overhead cams, a timing belt, forged rods, and lots of compression. It was a very high-tech engine for the time, and the car was quite sophisticated too. It truly drives like a modern car.

Ok, back to my car. I purchased it from the second owner, who had only had the car for 6 months or so. Here’s the story that I have pieced together: the car was purchased new, and driven for about 23,000 miles. Sometime in the 80s, the engine blew up. It was then stored until 2013 when the owner decided to have the engine rebuilt/modified, interior redone, and body painted. The car looked great, but many parts were still original and completely worn out.

I truly believe that the Fiat 124 is one of, if not the best vintage car bargain right now. They are cheap to buy, cheap to fix, easy to work on, parts are readily available, and they drive much much better than similar MGs or Triumphs.

 

My work started out pretty small. I knew that I wouldn’t have the budget to tackle the big items for a while, but I still wanted to drive the car as often as I could.

I did a full tuneup. It’s had an aftermarket electronic ignition installed, so really all it needed were spark plugs, wires, and a distributor cap.


Next it got fluids and filters. You can really tell that it’s a de-tuned racing car when you’re working on the drivetrain. The oil filter is absolutely massive- and the engine holds nearly 7 quarts of oil.


Shortly after I got it, one of the front wheel bearings got really loose. Turns out that the bearing nut doesn’t use a cotter pin- but the nut gets staked into a key way and isn’t reusable. The nut had been reused and pieces of it came off, ruining the bearings and races. I ended up replacing both front wheel bearings with new seals, races, and nuts.

 

Lots and lots of little stuff followed.
New drain plugs, originals were stripped:


New tie rod end:


New/used tachometer:


Somehow the panhard rod got bent? Wasn’t me.


New steering linkages and other tie rod ends:


One thing that is impossible not to notice on this car is just how small all the fasteners are. The engine mount bolts are 12mm. The oil pan bolts are 8mm. Biggest wrench I’ve ever used is a 17mm. Everything is tiny. Not weak- just tiny. Engineered very well.

 

I was able to drive it for a whole spring/summer without needing to do any other work, but the suspension clunks were getting pretty hard to ignore. It also rode like shit and would wheel hop badly if you tried to do any kind of burnout or drift, which was an issue. I was planning on replacing only the shocks and ball joints, but ended up replacing literally everything.

New control arms, bushings, ball joints, progressive rate lowering springs, shocks, control arm bolts, alignment shims, everything.


Even though I was very intimidated by the project, it was really pretty easy. You don’t even need a spring compressor if you have a spare jack handy.


The old bushings were the original 48 year old ones, and pretty shot:


The difference with the new suspension was staggering. Tuns were sharp, precise, controlled, and F’n fast. No more creaks, pops, or sketchy alignment. But most importantly: the ride quality. It’s really good. Firm- as you’d like it to be, but it soaks up bumps quite well. It got a massive amount of suspension travel, as it was designed to be a rally car after all. Takes our shitty Midwest roads like a champ.

 

Not long after I replaced the suspension, I started having weird issues with the clutch. Sometimes it wouldn’t return fully, and sometimes it wouldn’t disengage fully, making it really hard to get into gear. It would snap clutch cables frequently too. It turned out that the clutch pedal had bent where the clutch cable attaches, just from years and years of use. (And maybe some aggressive clutch kicks from me. Maybe.)


I also found that I was missing a spring that attaches to the clutch pedal and not only assists to push the pedal down, but helps return it fully. This spring takes hundreds of pounds to extend, which means I had to get creative to fit it in the car.


There’s barely any space underneath the dashboard, even for my tiny hands. Picking up that spring with all the washers jammed in it felt like holding a live grenade. Fixing all of that was another immense improvement to the driving quality. The clutch is so much easier to use and I was able to adjust it much better.

 

By the spring of 2023, I had started to hear a ticking noise coming from the engine. Actually, I had been hearing it since I had purchased the car, but always assumed it was a valve tappet that was a bit out of spec. The guys on the Fiat forum told me not to worry about it, so I didn’t. However, that ticking noise was getting a lot worse. But the really confusing part was that the valves were all very much within spec.


The ticking noise ended up being the connecting rod bearings. However, this was actually a blessing in disguise. Turns out that the crankshafts on the Fiat Twin Cam engines are nitrided, specifically so new connecting rod bearings can be slapped in. The bearings will wear out long before the crankshaft will get damaged. Racing engine stuff! You can see the heat discoloration on the crankshaft- not from bearing/journal damage, but from the nitriding process.


Thankfully, I didn’t need to remove the engine to swap out the bearings. I had to remove the exhaust header, intake manifold, and loosen the engine mounts. After doing this I could lift the front of the engine up with a jack, and place a 2x4 between the block and engine mounts. Then I had barely enough room to remove the oil pan.


The bearings were really, really bad. I can’t believe it was running so well on these bearings.


However, I ran into an issue when I went to install the new bearings. They didn’t fit!


This was really confusing as the 1.8L engine only had one crankshaft size- and the 1974 cars only came with 1.8s. Turns out that when the engine was “rebuilt” in 2013, it was actually just replaced with a European-spec 1.6L engine. This is actually a good thing, as the Euro spec motors have more compression, bigger cams, and take to modifications much better than the American spec ones.

I also repainted the exhaust header and oil pan while they were out.



After swapping out the rod bearings, I’ve started running Valvoline VR1 20W-50. The original spec calls for 10W-40, so the VR1 isn’t a huge jump. Plenty of oil pressure.

 

Later that spring I started having issues with the brakes. I was having lots of issues with calipers sticking, or the brakes getting hot. I started by replacing the soft brake lines, which was a major pain since the hard lines were original and pretty stripped out.


That didn’t work, so I ended up rebuilding the calipers. Super super easy, and I think it cost me $22 to rebuild all four calipers.

I still was having trouble getting the handbrake to work though, so I ended up buying two reman rear calipers which fixed the issue I think they were like $120 total? Super cheap to fix this car. New handbrake cable too.

 

Since then, it’s been really quite reliable. There’s always going to be small stuff to fix, I had to replace the transmission output seal, but that cost $11 and took an hour.


Replaced a tire that had a nail stuck in it. Actually pretty pissed about this one- the nail was from my own driveway.

 

So yeah, this is where it’s at today:






I’ve driven it nearly 10k miles, and in the spring and summer I drive it rain or shine. Including the purchase of the car, my total investment has been a bit less than $10,000. That’s excluding gas and insurance, but it gets 23mpg and insurance is super cheap. If you’re willing to spend a couple hours in the garage every couple months, you can stay ahead of a lot of issues and really make it quite inexpensive to own and use.

I’ll continue to update this thread when it inevitably needs more work. Right now I’m fighting the right side headlight- the low beam doesn’t wanna work.

 

Signed on for the adventure

 

Heck yeah! Do you have one?

 

Nice rides!

An old female friend of mine had a Spider Veloce with the straight 6. It was a sleeper for such a little car.

She had it meticulously maintained at Ferrari of Seattle.

"Drives like it's on rails" comes to mind. Fond memories driving that convertible around.

90's era Lotus' would be my choice if I was in the market for a lil' affordable convertible.

 

Fun ride....you should keep it forever

 

Nice work and a fun looking car.

 

Well sorta. My wife's first car was a 124, I bought an 81 Lancia Beta Coupe and put 175,000 miles on it before I gave it to my Stepson, In the year 2000 found an 81 Lancia Zagato in a local junkyard and restored it to show class condition, sold that to help pay for our oldest son's college then finally bought a new 2017 124 Abarth. Put 44,000 fun miles on it before selling it in May '24. It was too difficult for my wife to get in and out after she broke her femur. No we have a BOOORING. Honda Civic. I feel like I need a Groucho Marx disguise when I drive it.

P.S. Fiats and Lancias have three position headlight switches: Off, Dim and Flicker. All kidding aside, most problems can be traced to body grounds.

 

What a cool little car! I might have to look around for one.

 

I had a 1980 Spyder 2000, miss that car. So cool.

 

Miss Mitchell my 5th grade teacher in 1975 had one-pea green. It was her baby.
Your car looks great. I had a GT-6 in my youth so always partial to that big ole 6 in a tiny body
Enjoy the ride!

 

Home for the weekend, did an oil change. Been about 18 months, pretty overdue.

I started it up to get the oil warm, and it had a dead miss on one cylinder. Immediately identified it as cylinder 4- as there was a pool of water around the #4 plug. Turns out that there’s supposed to be a seal at the front of the cowl, and mine is missing. The car sat outside in the rain a couple days ago, and I pushed it back into the garage as I didn’t have the keys on me. That water sitting on the spark plug must’ve killed it.

Red line is the seal, blue is where the water pools. New seal is on the way.


The rest of the oil change went smoothly. I run 20W-50, and it gets pretty thick after sitting in the garage all winter. Warmed it up with the space heater.


I also picked up this Liqui Moly friction reducer while I was at the store, it was on sale. I’ve used their oil and engine cleaning products with great results before, but never something like this. Apparently all it does is add molybdenum (moly) to the oil to reduce friction and decrease engine wear. I ended up not using it- I got kinda spooked as it turns the oil dark gray. I like seeing the condition of the oil based on it’s color. Anyone used this stuff?

 

Replaced the cam cover gaskets with rubber ones instead of the cork ones that it had. The cork ones didn’t really leak, but they were constantly seeping just a little bit. Hopefully the rubber gaskets will stop the seeping.



Also replaced the fiber washers that go around the hold down bolts.

 

Nice! I want a project car when i retire. Was always fond of the TR6 because my mom had one but more spendy and my dad said it was a pain mechanically. This seems like a good alternative choice.

 

Of course I’m a bit biased- but I truly believe that the Fiat 124 is the best car deal in the country right now. Can’t recommend one enough.

Let me know if you’re ever in the market- I could put together a buyers guide.

 

My other dream car would be a 1965 Lincoln Continental. Image is of Dax Shepard’s 1967 and the Matrix 1965.