In my new-found race to get the car street legal before the 2009 Factory Five Open House this year (just over two months away at this point!), I’ve really put the pedal down when it comes to making progress on the car. Once again I’m planning two days of working on the car this weekend. Yesterday I spent about six hours working on the car, although admittedly it was in the mid 60’s and sunny all day, so motivation was down and time just chillin’ out outside was up.
The focus yesterday was getting the fuel system finished in the car. There’s a cascading set of things I need to do which depend on having verified that the back end of the car was “done” — such as getting the trunk actually riveted together.
Last week I opened up the side pipes and mounted the passenger pipe on the car so I could drill a hole for the oxygen sensor. I gave the pipe and the bung to a coworker who has a TIG welder and today I got the pipe back from him.
Its Sunday evening, and time for another update. I worked for a half day yesterday and a half day today on various things, but ran into a few issues that really chewed up a lot of my time. I did get a little wiring done, some of the heater plumbing, and a few other little things.
Its been two weeks since I put a post on here. For the most part I haven’t really done much up until today. I was out of town visiting my parents last weekend, which used up that weekend for any work on the car. As the weather is getting better, its definitely getting to be time to think about starting the car. There’s still some loose ends to wrap up before I can do that, and there are lots of odds and ends I need to take care of before I can go-kart with the car, but I’m making good progress every time I steal away a few hours in the garage.
Today’s list was: get the transmission filled, get the clutch properly bled, find the speedometer pigtail for the transmission, and mount a sidepipe so it can be fitted with a bung for an oxygen sensor. In a rare bit of productivity, I made it entirely through that list and then some.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.