For the first time in three years, I have an empty garage. Its been a few weeks since I posted anything on here because its been a few weeks since I worked on the car. Last week I spent a good part of Sunday cleaning the garage, and briefly had the car moved out during that time, but there is very little I want to do on the car at this point before the oil leak is fixed.

The combination of good weather and not having to be at work finally aligned yesterday, and I decided it was time to get the car down to Fortes Parts Connection to get Mike and company to take a look at the engine and fix the leak.

It was a nerve-wracking afternoon — driving the car to Framingham was both going to almost double the miles on the car, but also be the first time driving the car outside of a few miles from the house. It’s about 60 miles from here to Mike’s shop.

I headed down a bit before two yesterday, stopping to get gas. Interestingly, I had used about five gallons of gas, and had about 90 miles on the car. Considering a good bit of that was done without the oxygen sensor wired up (and thus getting particularly bad mileage), 18 miles per gallon is pretty damn good for a 5.7 liter V8.

The drive down was, as nervous as I was, totally uneventful. The car is brutally loud, although at highway speed I think the wind is nearly as loud as long as I’m putzing around at near idle. I really need to get the vent controls wired up before the Open House, as it was extremely warm in the car — I may also have too look at temporarily stuffing the gaps between the body and the chassis on the sides of the cockpit with fiberglass insulation to cut down on the airflow into the cockpit from the headers.

After a really fantastic drive down, I left the car at Forte’s. I believe they are going to be taking photos and posting it onto the FFCobra forums while they are working on the car, and I’ll pull them over and post on here as well. While the car is there I’m also picking up one of their driveshaft hoops and having them install it for me, since the car is on a lift.

So today, there’s a view I haven’t really seen in three years… an empty garage: