It was a gorgeous day today in Southern New Hampshire — sunny and 70 degrees. It was an awful day to be sitting in the office, but it was definitely a day to work on the car when I got home.
I wanted to get the starter wired up, and maybe the coolant filled, in order to start the engine tomorrow. As it turned out, I tried to start it tonight, but failed.
After two weeks of waiting, the side pipes finally showed up today. While, strictly speaking, I didn’t need them to start the car, it was definitely something I wanted to have on the car before starting the motor. Without the side pipe, I wouldn’t have the oxygen sensor on the car.
I don’t have the rubber hangers I need to install all the mounting brackets, but I wanted to get them bolted up to the car.
I didn’t want to lose any momentum I’d built up last week, so although today was a bit of a hectic day being back at work after a week off, I still wanted to get a bit of work done on the car when I got home. It was a nice sunny evening, so it wasn’t hard to motivate myself to open the garage door and work on the car in the sun.
I’m a little late posting an update — Friday and Saturday ended up being hectic days outside of working on the car, and it usually takes me a half hour or an hour to sit down and write one of these updates and go through the photos. I did want to get an update posted today about how the build week ended up. (I should also mention, speaking of going through the photos, that all the photos I take do get posted to this site but only a small portion of them end up featured in a post — the gallery link on the right side of the page will bring you into the full gallery.)
I got two more days of work done on the car, although both Friday and Saturday ended up a good bit less productive than the rest of the week. I’d been eight days on the car, so that doesn’t really bother me. I spent a bunch of time going to local stores for some parts I needed to get things wrapped up. The devil is in the details, and it turns out there was as lot of details I had to work though.
The build week continued today with my fourth day off work working on the car, and really the sixth consecutive day working on it. The last post about the IRS configuration covered the first couple hours of the day. I was absolutely exhausted and sore when I finished that work. As a result, I decided to focus essentially entirely on wiring for the rest of the day. That’d been basically my plan for most of the week anyway, but frankly I didn’t have the energy to do anything more physical than that.
I mentioned in last night’s update that I had spent a few hours yesterday evening working on fixing my IRS setup so my wheels and tires would fit correctly. This morning I finished up the process, at least well enough for now, and wanted to post an update about it.
Its annoying that the Factory Five manual explains this poorly at best, just plain incorrectly at worst. Thats apparently well known, but was news to me. Unfortunately had I known, it would’ve been much easier to tweak and adjust before I had assembled the trunk. On the upside, I do know that even with the trunk assembled, I can still get to everything back there.
Continue reading Making My Wheels Fit… or… How to Setup IRS Correctly
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.