Today was a very long day. I spent almost eleven hours working on the car, with breaks for dinner and lunch. I hadn’t intended on working that long, but I ran into issues that I wanted to work through before I stopped. The original goal today was to get the cockpit sheet metal installed and to get the wiring behind the dash straightened out in order to get the body on tonight.

The plan for the day fell through as the sheet metal took a lot longer than I expected, and the problem of the wheels not fitting was more serious than I had been thinking.

I started off the day trying to wrap up the wiring in the dash. I had left the high beam and turn signal indicators yesterday and I wanted to get them wired up.

The wiring was pretty straightforward. I wired one lead of each of the three lights to a common ground wire. The other three wires each went onto a feed wire.

I bundled up the four new wires and put a Delphi connector on them. That wraps up the dash with four harneses — a four gang with the turn signal and high beam indicators, a four gang with the wiring for the garage door opener switch and the wipers, an eight gang with the headlight and hazards wiring, and finally a 12-pin Molex with the wiring for all the gauge sensors. The 8-gang has one unused connector on it, which I’ll use for a switched 12v feed to the dash. Currently there’s no power feed for the gauges.

I’m considering breaking up the sensor wiring into one or more Delphi connectors, as they are more durable and easier to disconnect than the Molex ones, as well.

Once I had the wiring done I traced the wires and jotted down the pin configuration of each of the three Delphi connectors on the whiteboard. The photo probably isn’t of much interest to anyone, but I wanted to have them recorded in case I erase them.

Before I could deal with the wheel fitment problem, I had to get the cockpit sheet metal installed. Without the panels in their final place, I couldn’t be sure how much clearance I did or didn’t have.

I started off center punching and drilling the rivet holes that run along the 3/4″ tube the belts pass over. Somehow I managed to miss pre-drilling all of those two years ago, and never noticed it. Once that was done and the panel was clecoed into place, I could start drilling all the holes in the steel.

For the record, as tedious as the measuring and drilling of the aluminum was, the steel is ten times worse. I couldn’t even guess how long I spent doing that, but I’m sure it was over an hour.

The lower  cockpit corner panels (which are the ones that were hitting the tires) couldn’t be installed without removing the wheels, so I jacked up the car to remove the wheels. While it was jacked up, I temporarily fitted the panels to get a sense of how close it really is.

The gap was tiny — with the panel not fully installed, it made contact with the tire, and with some pushing I could get maybe a quarter inch gap.

Removing the wheels got me enough access to fit the panels. It took a good bit of futzing with them to figure out both how to fit them again, as well as how to adjust the fitment to get more room.

Before lunch I got most of the rivets in the back wall of the cockpit installed, including riveting in the glove box.

Most of that time was spent trying to force-fit the passenger corner panels in. This was a real nightmare — nothing fit right, I had to give it some good whacks with a mallet just to get things to fit. I did discover a trick that I made extensive use of on the driver’s side (which came out vastly better as a result. I used self-tapping 1/8″ and 3/16″ screws to forcibly pull the panels into position. By skipping every other rivet hole, I could get two screws around an empty rivet hole, install the rivet and move the screws. The end result was the panels being twisted and pulled into better position than they otherwise would’ve been.

At lunch I stopped at a hardware store and picked up a couple 1.5″ stainless bolts and when I got back I mounted the Manifold Air Pressure sensor to the firewall. The 1″ bolts I had were too small, plus the garage gnomes snagged one of them. (Thats another story — my best guess is a one-in-a-million shot ended up with the bolt in the bellhousing, so I have to remove the starter in the next couple of days and poke around in it to see if the bolt is in there…)

An example shot of how I used the self-tapping screws to pull the panels in tightly and riveted inbetween.

The final positioning of the drivers side panel came out pretty well. The passenger side is a lot sloppier, but it’ll be hidden under carpet.

The final fitment of the powder coated panels is done at this point. The rest of the cockpit panels are not powder coated.

Another poorly fitting part was the inboard corner of the drivers and passenger side of the cockpit.

This one took use of screws to get the panel into place, as well, and it still isn’t perfect. In fact, it irritated me enough that I didn’t do the driver’s side yet.

Once I reached this point, I spent some time experimenting with the wheels and tires, including getting the car back onto the ground to see how much rubbing there was (which was substantial).  I spent some time online looking for ideas and eventually spent a half hour on the phone with Richard Oben from North Race Cars. He explained to me how to fix the problem (which stemmed from incorrect installation instructions for the IRS suspension from Factory Five. They’ve been wrong since day one and the problem I had was pretty common.

I spent another three hours working on that this evening, but I will post a separate post tomorrow about it once the process is done. I don’t want the tasks buried in these Build Week posts, as its something I think would be very useful for others to be able to find easily to see and read.

I’m guessing wrapping that up will take another three or four hours tomorrow. That’s going to blow half the day, but if nothing goes wrong I still think I can get the wiring behind the dash redone and possibly be ready to toss the body on tomorrow evening.