Although I didn’t get much done on the car this week — two short weeks in a row makes for a busy time at work — I did actually manage to get the body put on the car. My father is visiting and was able to give a hand with it.
Read on for pictures!
Category Archives: replicabuilding.com
End of Summer
Well, its Labor Day and summer is over. Looking back, I can only wonder where the summer disappeared to. I didn’t get much of the stuff I wanted to do this summer done, with the Cobra or otherwise. With regard to the car, its disappointing. I’d hoped to have started the motor months ago and had hoped to go-kart a month ago. Even in early July I’d been shooting for getting it street legal in gelcoat by the end of September.
Needless to say, I haven’t started the motor and haven’t gotten substantially farther than I was three or four months ago.
The last two weeks I’ve been taking the little vacation I’ve had planned for the summer. Its been great, and very relaxing. In between trips to Florida with friends and to Ohio to see my new niece, I have gotten a bit of work here and there done on the car. Last Friday I took care of a bunch of little loose ends — tightening up and torquing the suspension, some more wiring and things like that. Not a lot to look at, but still a lot of stuff that needed to get done.
Next weekend I’m going to put the body on the car. There’s a lot of stuff I’ve been doing that will be easier to position and judge with it on the car. Its not going to stay there, but I can get a lot more dash and wiring work done if I can see where things are going to go relative to the body. It’ll also give me a chance to position the seats and figure out if I can get the Recaro seats to fit — if not I need to get the other seats dropped off somewhere to get recovered.
I’ll post pics next week, once the body is back on. There’s not much to see with the work I did in the last two weeks.
Heater and a New Suspension
Its been two weeks since my last post. During that time I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the garage trying to figure out how I’m going to run heat in the car. The heater unit that Factory Five used to sell isn’t really well designed for the car — it can be installed easily enough, but not attractively. I want to have the entire heating system hidden inside the dash area, not hanging out in the engine bay. I made some progress with it today.
Additionally, I got replacement suspension components for the car and installed those today.
A Mess of Wiring
Once again, another week has gone by and I haven’t gotten a lot done. I’ve finally mostly gotten my master bathroom usable again after almost a year since the great leak incident last fall. I’m burnt out from work, and just not having a lot of motivation.
I did spent a couple hours today back and forth to Lowes while trying to make at least a little progress with the wiring. Read on for more details …
A Long Delayed Update
Yes, I know its been almost a month since I posted an update. This post comes just in time, as I was just about to pass a month since the last post. So why the long delay? Well, its been a combination of being busy with summer, being stressed out at work, and struggling with more problems finding parts I need.
I have gotten some work done, though. Read on for details …
Fuel Injection
The Powerjection 1 (formerly Boss-EFI) system showed up last week, finally. Between that and the dash gauges finally showing up on Friday, I was in a good position to start making more progress again. As always, I didn’t get nearly as much done as I would’ve liked, but I did make some progress.
Final Powdercoating
This morning I picked up the rest of the powdercoating. I went a bit overboard and ended up powdercoating essentially all of the remaining panels (25 in all, for a total of just under 40 panels I got powdercoated). I’ve test fit most of them, and took advantage of that to get some photos of them as well as some of the other work I’ve done recently.
Read on for pictures… this is a long post with a lot of pictures, so be warned!
2008 Factory Five Open House
Last weekend was the 2008 Factory Five Open House. Once again, the pilgramage was made down to Wareham, MA for this gathering of everything Factory Five. This was the third I’d been down for it and the second year I caravaned down with the local Cobra guys.
For photos and videos, read on …
Some More Minor Build Updates
Yes, its been a while since I posted an update. I was away on business for a week and a half and didn’t get a lot done during that time. However, I have gotten some minor things done.
Last Friday I spent a good part of the morning getting all of the sheet metal positioned and drilled in the car, including the nose pieces and the cockpit pieces. Friday afternoon I dropped 25 some-odd pieces of sheet metal off at the powder coater, and should have them back next week. Friday afternoon I got the SpeedHut.com gauges ordered, as well. They should also be here next week.
I finally got an e-mail from the vendor I bought my Boss-EFI system from, and its being shipped to me tomorrow. I guess I’ll have THAT next week as well.
Today I got the passenger side 4-into-4 header installed as well.
Its all little baby steps but progress is being made. When the fuel injection and gauges show up, I may look at taking a week off from work and just trying to make as much progress as possible on the car.
I will get pictures posted soon of these bits.
Some Site Updates
I’m going to write two quick posts tonight, first this one with some updates on this website and another with a quick update on work I’ve done on the car.
First things first, I’ve added a custom Google Search to the site. On the navigation bar in the right column, click “Search Factory Five Information”. This right now only indexes a few sites, but I’m adding them as I find good sources of FFR information.
I finally got the Gallery integration fixed from when I broke it a few months ago. As part of doing that, I also added PicLens support to the gallery. If you click down into the galleries themselves from the posts or via the “ReplicaBuilding.com Photos”, you should get the PicLens buttons if you have the browser plugin installed, or you can use the “Start PicLens Slideshow” link to use a Flash version. Its pretty slick. The plugin can be installed from the PicLens button on the right navigation column as well.
I added a Videos link as well to the navigation. That page has links to a couple YouTube videos and downloads for HD versions. Right now its just two videos from the Factory Five 2008 Open House. (A post about that is coming, too…)
Finally, the logo up top got changed. A guy on the FFCobra forums was doing these computer renderings for people. The one in the logo is a color combination I asked for a rendering of, and is at least in the same vein as what I’m thinking for my car right now.