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.
Another busy day has come and gone. Once again I got a bunch of things done, and stumbled on a few problems. Today’s focus was on the dash wiring primarily, and when I couldn’t take standing at the work table any more, I’d take a break and work on other stuff. The dash isn’t done yet — although its mostly done — and I haven’t touched the wiring behind the dash yet, but I’ve got sketches of most of the schematics done.
Because I’m working on so many different things each day this week, rather than a witty subject for my posts, I’ll just periodically post an update with what I’ve been working on. Its a rather nasty rainy day today, and holed up in the garage I’ve gotten a good bit of stuff done. I started off the day wanting to get the new wiring for the backup light installed and to get the trunk buttoned up. While I’m not done for the day, I’m taking a break and wanted to post an update.
Yesterday I spent a good bit of the day getting the steering set up, futzing a bit with the alignment on the car and starting to fabricate a tool I could use with my iPhone to do a real alignment on the car. Today I got the suspension and steering totally finished — all the bolts are torqued down and the alignment is done.
The plan yesterday had been to spend time focusing on wiring and getting more sheetmetal installed on the car. I ended up spending the entire day getting the suspension and steering adjusted. As I started the process I was hoping I could get the car aligned yesterday, but everything took longer than I was expecting.
The last week has been pretty productive. Three nights out of the week I did at least an hour’s worth of work on the car. On Thursday night I riveted in the lower trunk floor and the trunk boxes to the car. I haven’t taken any photos of that work yet, but I will today. While doing it, I discovered that the small triangular pieces of sheet metal couldn’t be mounted because I put the panels on in the wrong order. The large side panels I put on last weekend kept me from being able to rivet the bottom edge of the triangular panels in the trunk. Last night I drilled out the rivets on both, cleaned up the mess from the silicone caulk and riveted the rest of those panels back in, in the right order this time.
I’m surprised thats the first time I’ve done that on the car. Not a big deal, no harm done except for pride and wasting an hour or two.
Its been a while since it was practical for me to do much work on the car mid-week. The time it took to heat the garage and the time I got home from work meant it just generally didn’t make sense to do much for most of the winter in the evenings.
Yesterday, however, it was sunny and warm enough to work with the garage door open. I decided to take advantage of it and try to knock off a couple of small tasks.
This is officially my 100th post on ReplicaBuilding.com — and I decided to post the 100th post today. Two years ago today I drove down with my parents, my girlfriend and her father to Factory Five and picked up the car.
Two years of blood, sweat and tears captured in a hundred posts and over a thousand photos.
Its been a long time, and the next big milestone — street legal — is finally in sight.
Its been a great two years and I appreciate all the nice comments from everyone who is following the built on here.
Here’s to hoping the car is totally done well before I hit 200!
After all the work yesterday on getting the fuel lines ready, today was going to be an easy day focused on getting the dash wired. Where yesterday was sunny and beautiful, today was cold, dreary and rainy and staying inside rather than in the garage seemed to be a good idea.
As it turned out, I spent about four more hours in the garage today just getting a bunch of miscellaneous things wrapped up.
In my new-found race to get the car street legal before the 2009 Factory Five Open House this year (just over two months away at this point!), I’ve really put the pedal down when it comes to making progress on the car. Once again I’m planning two days of working on the car this weekend. Yesterday I spent about six hours working on the car, although admittedly it was in the mid 60’s and sunny all day, so motivation was down and time just chillin’ out outside was up.
The focus yesterday was getting the fuel system finished in the car. There’s a cascading set of things I need to do which depend on having verified that the back end of the car was “done” — such as getting the trunk actually riveted together.