Anyone in this part of the country can tell you — this has been a brutal winter. The last snow in my yard stuck around until late yesterday. You still see piles of snow in shady places around the neighborhood. For almost two months I had more than four feet of snow in the yard, and snow banks north of seven feet fall along my driveway.

So the spring thaw we’ve finally had the last week or two has been a very welcome respite from the storm after storm of the winter. It was in the low 60’s yesterday, and nearly 70 today. It was definitely time to get the Factory Five out of the garage and put some miles on it. I want to do a fluid change in the next few weeks, but there’s not even a thousand miles on the car yet, so its not really pressing.

I had gotten my other car out of the garage a few weeks ago, and had moved the FFR back in front of the garage door. Yesterday I got it down from the wheel dollies and decided to take it for a ride. Having the car plugged into the battery tender all winter, it fired up immediately and Aimee and I took it for a spin.

The engine ran great, but during the drive I was getting some weird screeching noises when making right turns. We did about a 25 mile loop and it was really bad by the time we got home. I wasn’t sure what it could be — it seemed unlikely to be a wheel bearing, as it was only happening turning one direction, and sounded like it was coming from the rear of the car. The car also seemed squirrely.

Continue reading Spring in New England →

I know its been a month and a half since I updated anything on here, so I wanted to give a real quick update as to what’s been going on. For the most part, this month has been a total write-off. Not just car-wise, but in general. My job has changed to some extent, and between a vacation and work travel, I’ve been gone 3 out of 4 weeks this month on travel. I spent this last week sick. It’s been a long month … I had debated trying to find a shop this month to get it painted, knowing I wouldn’t be driving it, but that plan just didn’t come together.

Continue reading Yes, I’m Still Alive →

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.

Continue reading The Final Stretch … Hopefully →

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.