Building a Factory Five Roadster
Detailing the planning and building of my Factory Five replica Cobra.
Well, its official. With the exception of the bulb seal which buffers the body from the steel chassis of the car, everything I need to do before the body goes on is done. There’s still a lot left to do once the body is on, but the list of things I even can do before then is getting short.
Last night I got the last bit of stuff I had to do to the body done — mounting the brake ducts.
Now that my laptop is back into full working order, I could focus again after work today on my list of tasks prior to putting the body on the car. My hope is still that I can do it this weekend.
Today’s goal was to knock off two of the items that have been giving me grief or overall concern. The horn has been causing me problems for months because of a general lack of places I can mount it and have it be forward facing. The backup light was just general trepidation over cutting into the body.
This post is a bit late because I had a hard drive fail in my computer last week. That both delayed the copying of the photos to the website so I could do a post, plus it took up a huge amount of time this weekend doing data recovery on the failed drive. Among the other things on the drive, it had the high resolution copies of the last eight or nine month’s worth of photos from this site on it.
It took a good bit of technical kung fu, but I managed to recover virtually everything on the system, so I can finally do an update.
Because of all the time I spent on that, I only for maybe seven or eight hours of work on the car in the last four or five days. I’ve been working my way down my punch list of items that needed to be done before I could install the body, but the list isn’t empty yet.
I’ve had a bit of time this week to work on the car, but not a ton. Its been a frazzling week at work and I haven’t had energy the last two days to do a lot when I got home. I’m still plugging away to get to the point where I can install the body for good.
In that vein, I got some work done on the wiring as well as the transmission tunnel and some other sheet metal.
I didn’t get nearly as much done today as I was planning at the start of the day, but I was tired, and just wanted to spend part of the day vegging out.
I got the various body lights and associated wiring installed, and somehow (and I can’t explain how or why) it took me almost three hours to do it.
Its going to be a fairly nice week, though, so I expect to get a lot done after work during the week.
Yesterday was a long work day on the car. It was a fantastic day — mid 60’s and bright sun, and a very nice day for working on the car. I got out to the garage by 9 and worked on it until close to 5.
I managed to get a good bit of work done, as well as got help to get the body off the car, so I also got the body taken back off the car. The body being on the car really held up a bunch of work this week when I discovered that I couldn’t really reach the lights with it on. I did take advantage of it being on the car during the morning and early afternoon, however, to get the hood hinges put together and the trunk light installed.
This has been a disappointingly slow week where work on the Cobra has been concerned. While I’ve gotten a few things done, I’ve gotten more stuff started, or screwed around with, than I’ve actually finished. Generally speaking, if I want the car registered by the end of May, I can’t have weeks like this.
It was another gorgeous day here today, and I got a chance to spend a couple hours working on the car again. With the body on the car, I wanted to start getting the various lights wired up so I could finish up the mounting of the chassis wiring harness.
Today’s task was a simple one — get enough done on the car to feel comfortable putting the body on, so I could get all the light wiring out of the way.
I had hoped to really finish everything that needed to be done before doing a final installation of the body, but the work yesterday with the headers burned up enough time that there was no way. Its not every day I can get help to do the body, so I did what I could before then.
Continue reading “Installing the Body (Temporarily, again …)”
This post is a little delayed — I meant to get an update written up last night for the work I did yesterday, but ended up busy most of the weekend. I’ll post a second update for the work I did today.
Yesterday was a busy day. I got an early start on the car, being out in the garage by 9, and worked pretty steadily until 4 or so, trying to get some details out of the way to be able to put the body on the car today. I’d hoped I could get all the details worked out and maybe get the body on for good, but I didn’t hit that milestone so instead this week will be for getting the lights on the car, and I’ll pull it back off next weekend.
What I did do, however, was get some work done on the dash, and dealt with the gasket leak problem I had with the headers on the engine.