Piecing It Together

Benny Moreno's 1966 Fiat 1500 Cabriolet

The 1966 Fiat 1500 Cabriolet you see here is far from finished, but it's already come a long, long way. When Benny Moreno bought this car from a friend last summer, it was basically a collection of pieces. Now, it's up, running and getting better all the time.

"When I got it, it was just a great big pile of what my son called ‘junk,'" he explained. "It didn't have a top, it didn't have a windshield, the trunk deck was off it and one of the wheels was lost. It was in a shambles. I think they were in shock when they helped me unload it here!"

That was on July 25th of 2008. On the 26th, Moreno and his son Tony got to work. Starting in a shed in nearby Ruckersville, Va., Moreno gradually put the pieces together until the car was roadworthy; then took it home for more work. By February, it was in our parking lot and being gawked over by our staff.

When Moreno first saw the 1500, it was languishing in a friend's garage. He always admired it, but never really thought he'd one day be the proud new owner. The car had been parked since the min-nineties, when Moreno's friend had retrieved it from a body shop owner who just couldn't seem to get around to painting the car.

"He'd rebuilt the motor and he wanted to have the car repainted, so he took it to a body shop in Maryland," Moreno explained. "The guy took it upon himself to strip the whole car. He took everything off of it, which was a surprise, because all my friend wanted was a paint job! Well, the guy kept telling him he was going to put it back together, but several months went by, then a year went by and he never did. So my friend got a trailer and brought it home."

And there it sat, until Moreno dropped by for a visit and wound up taking on his next restoration project.

"I never did expect him to sell it, but when he said he wanted to, I told him to consider it sold," Moreno explained. "I never even asked him how much he wanted for it! He finally told me he wanted a thousand dollars for it and he'd haul it down to the house, so I said, ‘It's a deal!'"

Moreno, a lifelong car enthusiast, put the car back together with parts from IAP and several other suppliers. But with a car this rare, even IAP doesn't have everything needed for a restoration. Thankfully, Moreno (a former carpenter) had the skills to build the parts he couldn't find anywhere else.

The trunk lock, for example, is the same part used on a Ferrari model, which explains why it was remarkably expensive on eBay. Moreno knew that was too rich for his blood, so he engineered his own solution based on a '37 Chevy he'd seen at a car show. That car used a cable to pop the trunk, which looked like an interesting solution. Moreno was at a local junkyard looking for a wheel when he found a mid-seventies Spider with a lock that would do just fine. He already had the cable, so $20 later (for the lock, anyway—he took quite a few other parts, too), he had the solution he needed.

Another bit of D.I.Y. engineering can be found in the interior. When Moreno got the car, it only had one seat track on the passenger side. Those are next to impossible to find, so he used the one he had as a template to make three more. He then found that, for some unknown reason, the car had two front passenger seats, so he had to cut and weld the adjusting mechanism on the driver's side.

The project is far from done, but the car's already a comfortable cruiser that Moreno plans to use for car shows and day trips. That's going to be a lot of fun, but Moreno's already gotten a lot of satisfaction from the research and the work he's put into the car. The reactions he's gotten driving around on the few nice days we've had around here this winter have made it all the more worthwhile.

"It attracts everybody's attention," he said. "They're all like, ‘That's a nice-looking car, but what the hell is it?'"

An amazing piece of work is what it is. We're glad Benny's local, because we're looking forward to seeing how the car progresses!