I spent another four or five hours today working on the car. Once again I was stymied by not being able to find a couple parts I needed and had some minor issues with getting things soldered properly, but I did manage to get a bunch of little things done on the car.
All posts by George
Fuel Lines and Wiring
Back into the swing of things! I fired up the heat in the garage, watched the oil in the tank start to drop and heated up the garage even though it was below zero outside yesterday! I spent three or four hours in the garage. While a good bit of that was spent continuing to clean up some stuff, I did manage to make some progress on both the wiring and fuel lines.
A Midwinter Update
Once again its been inexcusably long since I posted an update on here… mostly because its been inexcusably long since I got any work done on the car. Between a winter of every-few-days storms that seem to have me doing shoveling and snowblowing every time I want to be working on the car, the holidays and the fact that it costs me five bucks in oil every time I heat my garage up to work on the car, I just haven’t gotten a lot done.
So where do things stand? Pretty much where they did back in November. I’ve not finished wiring the dash yet and haven’t really made any progress with the wiring on the car at all. There’s a lot of moving parts, a lot of stuff that isn’t standard and a lot of difficult-to-redo decisions to be made. One example: how do I power the fuel pump? The Ron Francis harness has wiring for it, but so does the Boss-EFI harness. Do I wire a power line to it, or power and ground? If I do power and ground, in theory I don’t need to use a fuel pressure regulator in the engine bay because the ECU will control it. I also don’t need a return line for the fuel, but if I go down that route and discover it doesn’t work or work well its going to be a ton of work to backtrack.
This is my plight right now. I’m also largely unmotivated by the relative tedium of the wiring, particularly because I made the mistake of not just building my own harness, which I’m positive at this point would’ve cost me at least five or six hundred dollars less (when I include the cost of the i-Squared setup), and have taken me a lot less time.
So in an effort to get back into the swing of things, I’m cleaning the garage today. I’m getting the tools picked up and organized. If I make good progress with that, I’ll go out and pick up a battery and a tender today and start the wiring in a more progressive manner from the battery out rather than the dash in.
I’m also going to try to make a concerted effort to get a full days worth of work every weekend on the car, and I hope to try to get some of the local Cobra guys out here to give me a hand in exchange for beer, meat or other such temptations. I can’t go through another winter of not having a usable garage so I want the Cobra done and on the road this summer. Thats the goal and one way or another I’m going to ensure that happens, even if I have to pay someone to finish it. Given how customized that is, I doubt that’ll be cheap or effective so I’m doubly motivated to just git ‘er dun.
Dash Assembly
Its been a few weeks since I posted a status update. Its been busy recently, and I haven’t had a lot of weekend time to work on the car. Unfortunately as it gets colder the odds of me doing much work during the week drops because its fairly expensive to heat up the garage for an hour or two’s worth of work.
I’ve taken this week off and have been getting some work done, along with just relaxing and enjoying some time off from work.
I’ve been still working on wiring, although its been going very slowly. Its not particularly hard, its not particularly complicated but its not a whole lot of fun so getting motivated hasn’t been easy. I decided to assemble the dash yesterday, though, as I need to get the switches wired up fairly soon.
Headlight Wiring
A few weeks ago I mentioned how I needed to get the body taken back off the car to get some of the next steps taken care of. A big part of this was to be able to get the front wiring harness out of the car, so I could finish taking it apart and adapting it to the wiring I needed in the front of the car. Today I started working on the rewiring of the front chassis harness to support the HID headlights.
I made some good progress, although I am guessing I still have several weeks of wiring work to go, given how little the Ron Francis harness really applies to my car.
Some More Dash Work
Its been two weeks since I posted an update. Last weekend my parents were in town visiting and we spent most of it doing typical New England fall activities like going to apple farms, leaf peeping and things like that. As such, I didn’t really do anything with the car. We got the body taken back off, and I got the alarm / push button start ordered from Digital Guard Dawg.
Last week the parts from Digital Guard Dawg showed up, and I had the push button so I could finish the switch panel. This weekend was equally busy, but I did get some time in the garage today to work on the mounting hardware for the switch panel. Read on for details and pictures …
Fall in New England
What does Fall in New England have to do with building my car?
Absolutely nothing, except I wish it was done so I could be driving through it.
I shot a few photos of my backyard with the leaves changing today, though, and wanted to post them.
So, read the rest of the post to see them and tomorrow we’ll return to our regularly scheduled blogging.
Painting and Polishing
This weekend is a three day weekend, and its only Sunday, so I’ll probably have another post tomorrow with whatever work I decide to do on my day off. Yesterday and today, however, I worked on getting some parts in the car painted, and polishing some other stuff. It doesn’t sound like a lot of work, but it was more than I expected.
You know the deal — read on for more.
Dash Switch Panel
There has been nothing, except perhaps the heater, that I’ve spent more time futzing around with and thinking about then the look of the dash. I’ve had an image in my head of the overall look I wanted, but this is my first car and first real fabrication of anything before. Knowing what I want, picturing it and actually creating it are all very different things.
For two months I’ve been trying to find switches I’d be happy with, and figure out exactly what switches I’d want and where. I decided on Saturday it was time to *ahem* “sit” or get off the pot… I needed to just do it. I stopped a “You Do It!” in Needham, MA on my way to visiting some friends for a barbecue. I picked up some various parts and decided it was time to see if I could build what I was envisioning. I’d collected up other bits and pieces over the summer, as well.
Read on …
Seat Mounts
The last weekend has been pretty busy. I’ll be posting really three updates for the work I did, mostly because it was sort of all over the place in terms of what I was working on.
I’m still in the midst of a spot where I really need to get the body back off the car so I can finish some wiring and mechanical work. Until then I’ve been trying to find little detail stuff here and there to work on. I have some parts I need to paint, and I wanted to them ready so the first nice (not so windy) day I can spray them with some black epoxy paint. I’m going to pull off the brackets I built for the brake reservoirs and repaint them, as well as the seat brackets.
To paint the seat brackets, I needed to get them fitted in the car and make sure I didn’t need to drill any more holes in them. That was the first thing I worked on this weekend. Read on for pictures.