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.
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 …
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.
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.
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.
I said in my other post that I’d get a couple more pictures of the dash work. I did get a couple today. On top of that, I disassembled the gauges from the dash and got a hand from Jen to get the holes in the dash drilled for the indicator lights for the high beams and turn signals. Additionally I did some work laying out the wiring to turn into a new harness for the HID headlights.
Generally I’ve gotten to the point where I definitely need to get the body back off the car. That’s going to be as soon as I can, I think
There’s no more details about today, but read the rest of the post to see the three quick photos I took today. I shot these with my phone, so the quality isn’t as good as the normal photos.
I spent a few hours yesterday again working on the wiring for the dash as well as the rest of the car. I got the Molex connector onto all the sensor wires and finished up the gauge wiring in the dash. The harness from there to the rest of the car I haven’t started yet, but probably will today.
I didn’t get any photos of the back of the dash, but I will next time I take photos of that work and I’ll post what the final bundle of sensor wires looks like. I did get some photos, and did some other work as well, so read the rest of the post for details.
This weekend wasn’t very productive on the Cobra front. A lot of other stuff has been sidelined lately and I needed to catch up on it. Yesterday was devoted to getting my truck (which I only really drive when I need to buy something big or for a few winter months) cleaned, fluids changed, etc.
Today was a gorgeous early Fall day and I just couldn’t bring myself to spend all day in the garage. I worked on the dash wiring a bit more this morning and wrapped up the power wiring for the gauges this evening. Thats pretty much it — read the rest of this post for a few pictures of the wiring.
Installing the body a week and a half ago opened up a bunch of other things I could focus on. A lot of these have been good both from the standpoint of being something new to think about as well as being things that needed to be done, at least in some form, before I can start the engine or think about “go-karting”. The fall is starting pretty quickly here — odds are I’ll get the engine started before winter at this point, but actually driving the car? Unlikely.
One of the things I took advantage of having the body on to start is the construction of the dashboard. There’s a lot to this, particularly in figuring out how to fabricate some of the things I want to do with it, figuring out wiring and finding parts for it.