Home at last

I finally got my Ghibli back this weekend after what seems an eternity. The last couple of weeks have certainly been eventful! As you can see from the picture above, I no longer have a large crack in the center of the front bumper, so now there's nothing to distract the eye from the fabulous shiny trident!


The replacement bumpers are of the new variety, made from a flexible plastic material versus the stiff fibre glass used for the old bumper that proved itself to be pretty brittle. As you can see in the picture above, the new bumpers are without the black rubber insert for protecting against scratches from minor nudges, but instead the new ones are a single tone. I think the new ones look nicer for it.


I also had the rear bumper replaced as the corners on the old ones had cracked as well as starting to flake a little around the exhaust outlets.

The new exhausts, given that they're much more flexible, require a steel plate to be installed across the width of the car onto which to bolt to provide some rigidity to the bumper. The factory was out of stock for the rear bar, with the part on back order and not available until September some time. I therefore purchased the part from David Askew instead, since he had it in stock. Despite being brand new and still in the original packaging, the part still required bending into shape before fitting. Maserati obviously did not have a tight tolerance on this part!

For the front stiffening bar, the factory did send a part, which was labelled as being for the front of a Ghibli. However, when Jorrit came to fit it, it turned out to have been mislabelled at the factory; it was in fact the rear bar from a Quatroporte. Although the factory said they had the proper part in stock and would send it immediately, after a couple of days it turned out that the part was also on back order at the factory and would not be available until September. I therefore ended up driving to visit David Askew, since I was over in the UK this weekend anyway visiting my parents. He had a used part in decent shape, which although required a bit of bending into shape, looked like new after Jorrit gave it a spray of paint.


The paint shop also removed the dent from the left front wing. They even touched up the paint, which is more than I asked for, but I'm not complaining since they did a good job! I'm sure I'll pay for it though.

Unfortunately, I'm still waiting to get the new front section exhaust to get fitted; the replacement needs a bit of refinement, but should be sorted soon.

It's great to have the car back since I've really missed driving it. I did have a bit of a scare today though... I was watching the voltmeter and noticed it slowly dropping from 12 volts, down to 11 volts and slowly less less. I was sure the alternator had packed in, so hurriedly drove back home before the car shut down. When I got back I got the multi-meter out and measured the voltage across the battery... 12.7 volts. Then with the engine running... 14.3 volts. Seems that the volt meter circuit has some problems... the voltmeter has been playing up for a while, intermittently on and off, but I've not seen it misreading before. Something new to look into!