At the end of my last post I said I hoped to get time yesterday to get more work done on the car. Amazingly enough, I actually did. I spent another three or four hours working on the car. I focused primarily on getting the hydraulic lines for the brakes and cutch filled and bled, although I did get a few other little things done.
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Emergency Brake
I’m rapidly getting to the point where the car will be startable and drivable. I don’t think I’m far off my plan to have it drivable in April. There are a few big buckets of things that need to be finished to get to that point — wiring, plumbing, and fluids. The wiring is getting close, at least close enough to start and drive the car. The plumbing has been coarse fitted but is coming along. There’s not much in the way of fluids in the car yet, other than the oil that came in the engine and the gear oil in the differential. The plan this weekend is to get as much of the plumbing done as possible, as well as filling and bleeding the hydraulics in the car (brakes and clutch).
Today, however, I wanted to get the emergency brake installed.
Heater Outlet Plumbing
I spent an hour or so today working on the car again. I wanted to do a bunch more, but I tweaked my neck during the week and its really been bothering me today. Bending over the car to work on wiring just wasn’t going to happen, but I didn’t want to lose a weekend.
While poking around the car for something simple I could work on, I decided to figure out a solution to the heater outlet on the intake manifold once and for all. A lot of wiring is done, and this is one part of getting ready to start the engine that just has taken a ridiculously long time to work out. Continue reading Heater Outlet Plumbing
EFI Wiring and More
I started off this weekend intending to get two solid days of work done. Saturday was Valentines day, and for obvious reasons that was out of the question, but today was Presidents’ Day, so I had Sunday and Monday to work on the car. I ended up doing very little yesterday, but today I made a ton of progress and in-all I’m ending up the weekend very satisfied with the progress I made.
More Wiring and Fuel Lines
I spent quite a bit of time this weekend working on the car. I’d guess six or seven hours spread between yesterday and today. I would’ve liked to have done more and would’ve liked to have had one weekend of work where I didn’t get hung up because I couldn’t find parts I needed, but I still got some work done on both the fuel lines and more wiring.
Powering Up the Car
This is going to be a relatively short post. I spent a number of hours today working on the car again. I picked up some various connectors and other parts I needed last weekend and wanted to get more progress made on the wiring today. While I didn’t get as much done as I hoped, I did hit an important milestone — not only applying power to the car as I did last week, but I got the car turned on!
Miscellaneous Wiring
I spent another four or five hours today working on the car. Once again I was stymied by not being able to find a couple parts I needed and had some minor issues with getting things soldered properly, but I did manage to get a bunch of little things done on the car.
Fuel Lines and Wiring
Back into the swing of things! I fired up the heat in the garage, watched the oil in the tank start to drop and heated up the garage even though it was below zero outside yesterday! I spent three or four hours in the garage. While a good bit of that was spent continuing to clean up some stuff, I did manage to make some progress on both the wiring and fuel lines.
A Midwinter Update
Once again its been inexcusably long since I posted an update on here… mostly because its been inexcusably long since I got any work done on the car. Between a winter of every-few-days storms that seem to have me doing shoveling and snowblowing every time I want to be working on the car, the holidays and the fact that it costs me five bucks in oil every time I heat my garage up to work on the car, I just haven’t gotten a lot done.
So where do things stand? Pretty much where they did back in November. I’ve not finished wiring the dash yet and haven’t really made any progress with the wiring on the car at all. There’s a lot of moving parts, a lot of stuff that isn’t standard and a lot of difficult-to-redo decisions to be made. One example: how do I power the fuel pump? The Ron Francis harness has wiring for it, but so does the Boss-EFI harness. Do I wire a power line to it, or power and ground? If I do power and ground, in theory I don’t need to use a fuel pressure regulator in the engine bay because the ECU will control it. I also don’t need a return line for the fuel, but if I go down that route and discover it doesn’t work or work well its going to be a ton of work to backtrack.
This is my plight right now. I’m also largely unmotivated by the relative tedium of the wiring, particularly because I made the mistake of not just building my own harness, which I’m positive at this point would’ve cost me at least five or six hundred dollars less (when I include the cost of the i-Squared setup), and have taken me a lot less time.
So in an effort to get back into the swing of things, I’m cleaning the garage today. I’m getting the tools picked up and organized. If I make good progress with that, I’ll go out and pick up a battery and a tender today and start the wiring in a more progressive manner from the battery out rather than the dash in.
I’m also going to try to make a concerted effort to get a full days worth of work every weekend on the car, and I hope to try to get some of the local Cobra guys out here to give me a hand in exchange for beer, meat or other such temptations. I can’t go through another winter of not having a usable garage so I want the Cobra done and on the road this summer. Thats the goal and one way or another I’m going to ensure that happens, even if I have to pay someone to finish it. Given how customized that is, I doubt that’ll be cheap or effective so I’m doubly motivated to just git ‘er dun.
Dash Assembly
Its been a few weeks since I posted a status update. Its been busy recently, and I haven’t had a lot of weekend time to work on the car. Unfortunately as it gets colder the odds of me doing much work during the week drops because its fairly expensive to heat up the garage for an hour or two’s worth of work.
I’ve taken this week off and have been getting some work done, along with just relaxing and enjoying some time off from work.
I’ve been still working on wiring, although its been going very slowly. Its not particularly hard, its not particularly complicated but its not a whole lot of fun so getting motivated hasn’t been easy. I decided to assemble the dash yesterday, though, as I need to get the switches wired up fairly soon.