Although I seemed to have spent all weekend feeling very unproductive, I actually managed to get some stuff done. Along my goal of getting the engine started this month (ha!, not going to happen…) I needed to get the radiator in the car and start getting the cooling system plumbed.
This is a long post, so you might want to grab a snack first. I probably should split this into two posts…
I added a new page to replicabuilding.com this morning. This adds a search page, which will find information both on this site and on a list of sites I’ve found useful information at in the past.
I’ve been doing these searches manually on Google for a while to find information because their search engine tends to be better than the ones on the sites in question, and I found I could do this which is a lot faster and easier.
The link to the search page is on the right of the website.
Unfortunately this weekend wasn’t quite as productive as I hoped, but I did manage to get some work done on the car between having to shop for parts, the crappy weather, seeing Iron Man, and a visit to the ER last night.
Yeah, the ER. Read on for pictures of what I did get done, as well as THAT story.
Keeping up the pace set yesterday with the install of the motor, I decided to spend most of the day today working on the car. I’m exhausted now, but it was nice to get some more done on the car. I started by thinking about mounting the radiator but ran into issues, then went to installing the driveshaft but ran into issues and ended up with mounting the radiator… with issues.
Today was a big day in the build: the installation of the engine. The day started off with a breakfast get together with some of the local Cobra guys at Skip’s in Chelmsford. (Ironic I lived five minutes from there for years never having gone and now I’ve been there twice in the last month or so…)
One of the local guys, Ray, who lives in Dracut came by in the morning and I rode down there with him. Breakfast was good, although the turnout was small this month. As we were leaving another one of the Cobra guys, John, asked to come up and was, of course, welcome. Jen also came over to lend a hand and take photos.
For a writeup and pictures, read the rest of this post.
I made a small change this morning to the code I wrote that is producing the live camera image. There have been times lately that there have been a dozen or more people watching the camera at a given time, and at a peak I’ve had several times more than that. Previously the code on replicabuilding.com would pull an image from my garage once per user, which was both inefficient and was slowing things down for everyone during those times.
This morning I updated the software so it only will pull a image from the garage once every ten seconds no matter how many users are watching. This should mean two things — first response should be much faster if more than one person is watching and second you may note the timestamp in the image may be up to ten seconds behind. Hitting refresh on the image will not update it any faster than once per ten seconds.
This should make both my web server, my network here and the viewers happier.
I took today off and spent a good bit of the day working on the car. The primary thing I needed to get done today was get ready to drop the engine in tomorrow. After getting a bit of a flash of insight on how I can mount the I-Squared power controller, I ended up doing that as well.
This weekend hasn’t been terribly productive from the standpoint of getting work done on the Cobra. My parents have been in town and that has been most of my focus. However, during some free moments, I’ve gotten some small bits of work done on the car.
I’d ordered some more parts from Breeze Automotive this week and most of them showed up on Friday. This morning I installed a fuel filter bracket, adjusted some running of the fuel lines, and some other miscellaneous bits. Jen also came over and helped me bend the larger fuel line.
This three day weekend started off, as I posted two days ago, with picking up the engine. That wasn’t the only work I got done this weekend, however. Although this ended up another weekend where I seemed to spend more time in stores than working on the car, I made some good progress. Read more for details and (hopefully) photos.
I apologize in advance for any screwiness you may see while browsing around replicabuilding.com.
I upgraded to the new version of WordPress, which has been out for a few months. Unfortunately the Gallery plugin I use to manage the photos doesn’t work with it and the authors of it don’t seem to be in any sort of a rush to get it working, apparently because they disagreed with some of the changes.
I’m trying to figure out what options I’ve got for managing photos going forwards, but posts for a while may be just image dumps like the last one until I figure something out. You may find older links may no open correctly into the larger images, as well.