No Car work

Sorry, I did not get to work on the car this week. It ended up taking longer to get both my VW and my garage door fixed, and then I was just way behind on routine life stuff. Here are some of the promised pics anyway...

Here is the broken spring...


Here is the replacement bearing...


Here is the bearing in place in the firewall...

Little accomplished

I only worked on the car once this week, really. I did manage to get the U-joint that connects to the steering rack connected. I got the shafts going through the firewall okay, though I did have to take apart the U-joints that were previously connected to the other shafts, even though I had used LOC-TITE on them. I got the original bearing installed in the firewall, but the new bearing did not quite fit with the shaft that has the steering wheel bolted to it. I tried force. I tried oil. I tried freezing the shaft so it would shrink a tiny bit, but that still was not quite enough. It is so close, though. I think I will try freezing it again and carefully heating the bearing so it will expand the hole that the shaft fits through.

Right now, I cannot even work on the car if I wanted to because my garage door finally broke good and proper. The huge spring that helps lift the door snapped. Thank goodness it was safety-wired or the Cobra body would have been damaged. I will get that fixed very soon. I took a couple of pictures, but will wait on posting them until next week when hopefully the steering system will be completed.

No Labor for Labor Day week

I did not get to work on the car this week. I did manage to get the missing part ordered from Fastenal, and I picked it up on Friday. I've fallen a little bit behind other things in life, like renewing my driver's license that expired in May, which I only found out about when I got stopped for speeding in Winfield, MO. Doh!

Steering

I got a fair amount done this week before running into problems. I did complete the brake pedal assembly installation, including the brake light switch. I had some trouble getting the bolts through the firewall straight, but otherwise it was not bad.

Then it was on to the steering chapter. I put together the shafts on my workbench, connecting them with the U-joints, all of which I had painted long ago. Everything seems to fit okay, but the paint makes the fit through the firewall bearing very tight. The bigger problems arose when I realized that I was shorted one of the two bearings that should have come with the kit. That is a special part that I can't just walk into an auto parts or hardware store to buy. I can send away to get one delivered to my local Fastenal store, but that will take a few days, and naturally this happens on a long weekend. Some mail order places sell them for about 6 to 8 bucks, but charge another 6 for shipping. Fastenal is $11, but no shipping.

I also ran into obvious problems when I was loose fitting what I could while dealing with the bearing shortage. My steering shaft does not quite clear the power steering pump and its hoses. It is very close, but I need to get another half inch or so of clearance before I am good to go. I am not sure how I will do that, but I ought to figure out a way without too much trouble. Maybe re-routing the hoses, maybe adjusting the existing pump bracketry and getting a different belt, I am just not sure yet.

I had more tool troubles, too. My old Craftsman drill seems to have given up. Neither battery seems to be charging at all now. (Yes, it is plugged in)! I also had a socket adapter break when I was torqueing one of the bolts to its final tightness. Fortunately, I had a spare one and could continue working. And my garage door got stuck again, this time worse than the first. It turns out that a piece of wood trim had come loose and gotten jammed in the works, causing one of the rollers to jump the track. That got fixed right this time, now that I could see what was going on.

Oh, and kudos go out to NAPA. A long time ago, I had a different garage door problem that required a bolt replacement. I just happened to have one the perfect size on hand in my car parts, so I used that. It was not spare though, and this week I needed it for some of the steering system mounting. Off I went to NAPA and they just let me take one for free. Good thing I was wearing my NAPA hat when I went into the store, I guess. They didn't know me from Adam.

Sorry for no pics. I will double up next week.

Another 2 1/2 Chapters Finished

It was not all gravy, but I managed to find quite a bit of time to work on the car this week and was very productive. I finished the chapters about mounting the cockpit and upper frame.


I did manage to get a rivit in each footbox outside corner, and I got the excess fiberglass trimmed back (about an inch on the driver side, less on the passenger side) to add some more room for feet on both sides. Notice all the dust in the picture. Man, is that stuff itchy and hard to wash off.
And it was particularly hard for me to get my big arm down in the engine compartment to rivit this piece of aluminum (actually, one on each side) that seals the cockpit near the footbox area from the transmission tunnel.


I did have quite a few weird issues, mainly with tools, that required fixing or at least patience. I used my air die grinder to sand off the excess fiberglass, but the compressor could barely keep up. The light on my hanging work light died. My garage door had one of its rollers pop out of its track. I ran down both of my cordless drill batteries and got very frustrated with not being able to work while they SLOWLY recharged. That actually went on for a couple of days before I broke down and bought a new corded drill from Harbor Freight. And OMG, what a huge difference that made. My cordless much not have much of a motor, while the new one really cuts great. I had to drill 4 holes in some thick steel frame members and what was taking about a half an hour and all of my strength with the Craftsman 15.6 Volt drill, the new one took about a minute. I could not believe how much better it cut. Thirty bucks very well spent.

Right now, I am in the middle of working on the brake pedal assembly,

its frame (which will eventually hold the brake master cylinders on the engine side of the firewall),


and the brake light switch. One step that the manual said would be very tough, replacing 6 studs that come from the manufacturer heavily thread-locked, was actually very easy. Here is a picture with one old stud still in place before I removed it.


The next step was drilling the frame for the holes that hold the pedals in place was a huge effort, until I got the new drill. I should finish the brake pedal stuff pretty soon this week. BTW, I have decided to leave the clutch pedal in place but will fasten the pedal to the top of the footbox to keep it out of the way. I am not going to cut the hole in the firewall for that master cylinder though. I figure I can do that easily enough later on if I decide to ditch the automatic transmission for a manual. Then the next step will be to work on the steering system.

Mushing onward

Having satisfied myself that my engine title issues will resolve themselves down the road (in Rolla), I have gotten back to work on the car fastening down the cockpit tub this week.

This should have been a pretty easy task, but it turned out to be a little tougher. I had to drill 4 holes in the tub that lined up with the pre-drilled holes in the frame to hold the tub in place. Easy enough. But while I was down there, I was also supposed to drill 10 more holes for the seat and seatbelt mounting spots. Twelve were easy enough, though I really don't like laying on my back doing this work. But 2 of the holes were not accessible any more because they were obstructed by the driveshaft safety loop that I installed a few weeks ago.

My first solution seemed simple enough--just cut off the end of the safety loop that was not needed and was the source of the obstruction. So I locked the cutoff wheel to my angle grinder and plugged it in, prepared to just lop off the excess. When I tried to figure out how to hold the tool at an angle that would let me cut through the steel, I had such a hard time maneuvering while on my back under the car, it seemed extremely dangerous to go that route. In an inspired attack of safety consciousness, I instead decided to try to take a bunch of measurements and drill the holes from above. I used a 1/8" bit and managed to blindly hit both 3/8" holes in the steel after drilling through the fiberglass. Then I widened out the holes by hand with a larger bit and hand file.

Next up was drilling more holes and riviting around the footboxes. Simple enough, except that my frame includes a modification that Hurricane implemented after some other builders figured out a way to get more footroom for the driver, and the instructions for fastening the tub around the footbox don't quite work as they did before. So I posted some questions online and am waiting to get satisfactory guidance on how to proceed before I do any more riviting there. Pictures will come when I finish up. Should be pretty quickly.

Achilles Tendonitis

I did not work on the car this week as I am fighting a very sore left heel. I already had a doctor's appointment scheduled for this past week and she said I had damaged my achilles tendon. She ordered the usual--rest, ice, and stretching--and also gave me Celebrex. And my mom got me a heel pad for my shoe. All of that seems to be helping a great deal and I am off the crutches I used earlier in the week and actually feeling pretty good.

I did go to the Gateway Cobra Club monthly meeting at Sonic in Chesterfield this past Tuesday. It used to conflict with my trivia night at Chevy's, but that seems to have ended. Anyway, the guest speaker was Officer Fountain, the guy who is in charge of doing state inspections of these cars for the county. His talk told me what I already knew, that my engine is just not going to be titleable with them as is. Very depressing.