Filling The Transmission

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.

Continue reading Filling The Transmission

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.

Continue reading Emergency Brake

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.

Continue reading EFI Wiring and More

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!

Continue reading Powering Up the Car

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.

A mashup of a bunch of projects I've worked on.