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.
Category Archives: The Build
Making My Wheels Fit… or… How to Setup IRS Correctly
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
Build Week – Wednesday
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.
Build Week – Tuesday
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.
Build Week – Monday
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.
Finishing and Aligning the Suspension
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.
Suspension and Steering Adjustments
The plan yesterday had been to spend time focusing on wiring and getting more sheetmetal installed on the car. I ended up spending the entire day getting the suspension and steering adjusted. As I started the process I was hoping I could get the car aligned yesterday, but everything took longer than I was expecting.
The Final Stretch … Hopefully
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.
Passenger Rollbar Mount
Its been a while since it was practical for me to do much work on the car mid-week. The time it took to heat the garage and the time I got home from work meant it just generally didn’t make sense to do much for most of the winter in the evenings.
Yesterday, however, it was sunny and warm enough to work with the garage door open. I decided to take advantage of it and try to knock off a couple of small tasks.
A Bunch of Loose Ends
After all the work yesterday on getting the fuel lines ready, today was going to be an easy day focused on getting the dash wired. Where yesterday was sunny and beautiful, today was cold, dreary and rainy and staying inside rather than in the garage seemed to be a good idea.
As it turned out, I spent about four more hours in the garage today just getting a bunch of miscellaneous things wrapped up.