Category: The Build

Having had an office party fairly late last night, I took today off to just relax. I decided to pull the Miata out of the garage for the weekend, and fired up the heat so I could do some work on the car. I’m still trying to find a place to do the body work and painting, but I do have things to do beyond that, as I said in my last post.

I decided I wanted to get the center console worked out and perhaps fabricated this weekend. That’s my kind of work on a lazy day — mostly sitting around staring at the car trying to visualize how I wanted it to both look, and go together.

Continue reading “Center Console Work”

Its been a couple months since I’ve posted anything on here. As any of you who have looked at the live camera has likely seen, I took advantage of not having the body buck in the garage this winter to be able to move things around and park my Miata in there, too. The upside of that is that its immensely easier to snowblow my driveway, but the downside is that its harder to do work on the Cobra.

Continue reading “A Winter Update”

Yes, I know, I’ve been inexcusably absent from updating this site in the last five weeks. The drama of the last couple of drives really got me in a bad mood and working on the car was turning into a chore, not something that was fun.

Continue reading “Trick or Treat”

This morning I got the car up on jack stands (not an easy task with the particular combination of floor jack and ride height that I’ve got) to start making a pass over the car to see the results of the first drive.

Continue reading “First Pass of the Carnage Report”

Its been a busy week with the car, and I probably should’ve written a couple of posts over the coarse of the week, but better late than never. As the last post said, the car was basically done last week, as far as getting it registered is concerned. The goal for this week, if possible, was to get a VIN number for the car, perhaps get it registered, and maybe even get a chance to get a first drive in. My parents are here this weekend, and getting a first drive in would be a nice coincidence, as they were here the day I picked up the kit, the first time the body went on and would be here for its first drive.

Some of the people who are following my build may have already read the story of this week elsewhere, and we’ll get to it, but I’ll start at the beginning of the week, when I was getting my VIN number.

Continue reading “Registering the Car and First Drive”

Well, I’m not sure how more direct I can be than that. Its done, as far as I’m concerned, for now. There’s still some minor issues, and I may work a bit on those over the next week or two, but its time to deal with the state.

I started off today planning on just getting the car down from the jackstands, but ended up working a few hours on the car as well.

Continue reading “Done. (For Now)”

I spent another five or six hours working on the car today. My goal going into this weekend was getting the car done, as far as registering it is concerned. I didn’t have a long list of things on that punch list, and frankly decided to take care of items that were on my “post-inspection” punch list, too.

Its not “done” yet, but its close and I see no reason to think it won’t be by Tuesday.

Continue reading “Almost There …”

An quick midweek update: I’m getting very short on tasks left before getting the car inspected. At this point, its largely wrapping up some of the electrical work before putting the dash on, but there were a couple things I decided I wanted to take care of tonight.

The door latches weren’t installed completely — the latch on the door was, but the catch on the chassis wasn’t. I wanted to get the doors wrapped up.

I also bought a replacement heater bypass valve last week because I decided I wanted to have a variable electronic one, rather than a simple on/off vacuum actuated one. I also wanted to swap that out today.

Continue reading “Heater Valve and Door Latches”

This was one of the more productive weekends of work on the car that I’ve had in months, if not since last summer. I’m getting down to the end of my punch list of things to get done before getting it inspected, and its starting to really feel like I’ll be driving it this year.

The list of remaining items to get it inspected was pretty small — wipers, fix the hazard lights, get the seats in, the dash and steering wheel installed, and install the mirrors. While there’s other stuff to do on my list, like get the heater ducting run completely, strictly speaking they’re not necessary to get it inspected.

I managed to get a lot of those items taken care of this weekend.

Continue reading “The Home Stretch”

After the disappointment of last weekend, with discovering I had the wrong splash panel and the windshield was cracked, I really wanted to try to make more progress this weekend. Its getting close to September, and it won’t take many more wasted weekends before I can’t get the car on the road this summer/fall.

I had talked to Factory Five this week about the windshield and the splash panel, and they were going to ship me both. Knowing the condition packages from them have gotten here in before (drop kicked was the way I described it to them), I decided I’d rather take part of a day this weekend and drive down there. Its about 90 miles each way, but its worth the time to avoid getting another broken windshield and losing more time.

Continue reading “Windshield Repair and Install”