Bret's Cobra - Page 9 (External Accessories)

page 1 (delivery & frame)          Page 2 (engine, frame paint)       Page 3 (brakes, footboxes)         Page 4 (engine)      Page 5 (engine2)      Page 6 (engine start)      Page 7 (Go-Kart)       Page 8 (Body)      Page 10 (Interior)    Page 11 (Paint)    Page 12 (Done!)

Light Install (Fall 2009)

Mounting the light fixtures onto the body isn't all that difficult, but sure does provide a sense of accomplishment.  Getting the headlights adjusted was tricky and they have very flimsy clips that hold them into place which I need to replace with ones I'll fabricate from some thicker metal.  I spent more time fabricating a mounting for by improvised backup light and getting my "hidden" 3rd brake lights into place.  The 3rd brake lights are two small strips of high intensity LED's that are crystal clear when off, but glow bright red when I step on the brakes.  They are mounted just beneath the license plate light and are very hard to notice until I hit the brakes.  (In the picture the license plate light is on, but the brake lights are not and you can't even see them past the glow of the license light).

Check out the pictures of the completed lights.  My kids walked out in the garage after the lights, doors and windshield were in place and said, "Dad, it's really starting to look like a car."

Hood (Fall 2009 - Winter 2010)

The next key piece between me and good driving is the hood.  The hood is just a piece of fiberglass and I bought the "hood hinge" option which is a fairly complicated hinge and mounting setup which should be nice once finished, but the old fashioned hood pins would be easier :-).  The procedure starts by trying to get the hood to fit optimally in the hood opening by using spacers and sanding off any places where the hood is too large.  In order to figure out exactly where to mount the hinge pieces it's useful to know where the location of the edge of the engine bay opening is on the hood itself.  This allows one to create the correct clearance around the hinge pieces to make sure the hood seats fully into the opening.  The best way to get this location is to run a marker along the edge while the hood is in place, but there is really no good way to get your hand in there while the hood is down.  That's when it's very convenient to have a 7 year old who likes to help in the garage :-).  He's excited to do this again when it's time to tighten the bolts for the hood hinge final installation.

 The next step is to adjust the curve on the "hoop", the large piece of the hinge that mounts to the hood, so that it keeps the correct curve of the hood.  I drilled holes in the hood and used cleeko's (temporary rivets) to hold the two pieces together while I made many, many adjustments to the hood and the hoop.  Eventually I got it adjusted adequately and wanted to do a trial fit with all the hinge pieces in place.  The difficulty is that you can't set the hood in place and then install the hinge pieces because there's no way to get at the mounting points.  So I used a tie-down strap looped over a hook in the ceiling to hold the weight of the hood while I temporarily installed the hood pieces.

It seemed like everything could line up well so it was time to get to the hard part.  The best way to mount the metal hoop to the fiberglass hood is with some very strong (and expensive) Marine epoxy.  The stuff dries in around 15 minutes so it must be applied quickly and it needs to stay above 60 degrees (which is difficult even with our mild weather).  I had a space heater running right beneath the hood but it kept things too hot and the epoxy dried too quickly making it difficult to work with.  After mixing up a few batches and working hard to get off any excess with a hammer and chisel (did I mention that it dries quickly and becomes very, very hard), I used the strap again for another test fit with the hoop glued in place.  (The epoxy is that light blue/green stuff).  One thing I'll caution everyone about is that this stuff has a very strong smell.  I was wearing a gas mask and had no problem directly, but I didn't think to turn off the furnace while working with this stuff in the garage and it pulled in an amazing amount of the smell which caused quite a nightmare (but that's a different story).

One other thing I did while working with this nasty epoxy and the hood, was extend the hood material under the scoop a little ways.  One common complaint about these hoods is that the scoop opening is simply a cut slice, so the front hood edge lines up vertically with the front of the scoop.  While it hasn't really annoyed me, it was easy enough to fix while I had this goop out that I figured I'd fix that as well.  A trick I learned from another builder was to get small piece of vinyl edging (like for bathrooms) and tape that, with some metal backing for support, through the scoop, extending the lower surface of the hood and creating a mold with a curved back edge.  Then just fill this from underneath with this epoxy and you now have an extended hood area under the hoop. 

After getting the hood installed on the hinges, it was time to put on the locking latch handles.  It was pretty straight forward except that the footbox for the driver has sheet metal up pretty high for covering the pedal box and much of the electricals and it made it very tight for the shaft of the latch.  But it all fit in fine and seems to function quite well (the hood hasn't popped up on me yet).  There is still some adjustment work to be done to get the hood to fit well, but at least it's in place and functioning.

Legally on the Road!!!! (Winter 2009/10)

After the body was on I had my insurance agent come for a visit to check out the progress and take a few pictures and submit a package to the underwriters for coverage.  It took a few months, but on Christmas Eve my best Christmas present arrived in the mail.  They had approved the cobra for coverage!  After filling out their form and sending in the check, I received the policy number and all the required information.  On new year's eve, I went to the DMV, paid my fees and came home with the stickers making the car legally drivable.

Running out of gas:  The first thing to do now that it was road legal was to head to a gas station and fill the tank. I had put in a couple of loads from the lawn mower's 2 gallon gas can, but it had done quite a bit of idling and adjusting over the months so I knew the tank was trending toward empty.  My son wanted to ride with me to the gas station so we loaded up into the car.  I was very nervous about the trip because it was by far the farthest it had driven and I really wasn't sure that it would make it without problems.  But It started up just fine, but I was surprised when after backing it into the street the engine just died and would not restart.  We got out and pushed it back into the driveway and I took the gas can to the station in one of the other cars and put another couple gallons in the tank.  It started right up after this and we made a problem free run to the gas station.

Exhaust Leak issues:  With the car this close to complete I did quite a bit of driving.  At the superbowl party this year I gave rides to nearly 20 people and put about 50 miles on the cobra.  When there were nice breaks in the weather I drove it quite a bit and now have over 100 miles on the clock.  After driving these miles the exhaust header bolts loosened up and allowed the gaskets to blow out.  I knew there was a "bit of a leak", but I hadn't realized how many issues it could create so I chased a red herring of some kind of ignition issue that I thought was at the root of the rough running.  But it turns out that it was just the exhaust leaking at the headers causing the poor running issues.  Some new "Remflex" gaskets and locking header bolts (and some scraped knuckles) seems to have taken care of the main problem.  There still may be some leaks around the header to side-pipe connection, but I haven't addressed this yet.

Sorry, no pictures of these fun events.  I really need to get a new video of driving around now that it's road legal :-)

Safety Wires, Wind Wings and Mirrors (Spring 2010)

Something I forgot to document earlier before doing any of the longer test runs, I installed safety wire on the wheels. These are true knock-off wheels, which means the single tri-wing spinner/nut is the only thing holding the wheel on the axle. The purpose of the safety wire is twofold: 1) act as a last line of defense against loosening wheel nuts, 2) make an easy visual check for any issues with the wheel nut.  You can see from this picture that the wire  connects one of the wings of the spinner to the main wheel holding it in the direction of tightening. (Note that the driver's side spinners are right hand thread and the passenger side spinners are left hand thread in order to help keep them tight under acceleration).  While twisting the wire I placed a small socket in between the wires to create that extra loop in the middle.  If any loosening begins to happen this loop will close up making an easy visual cue that something is wrong.

After quite a few trips around the neighborhood and nearby 45 MPH streets I felt confident enough to run it up to 55 on some nearby country roads.  Everything worked perfectly and it was a fun drive, but it became apparent that the wind can start to get pretty bad at highway speeds in this open top roadster.  I had earlier purchased some wind wings and sun visors because of advice about this particular issue.  The install of these items went pretty smoothly and the only issue was with slight interference with the doors and the wind wings, but that was easily solved.  The clamp method of installing the wind wings is much easier than the older style of screws into the windshield frame with much less risk of cracking the windshield.  But it does have the downside of leaving marks in the post where the screw tightens down.

I also forgot to mention the Mirror installation earlier in the winter.  The center mounted mirror actually screws through the body and into the frame with some nice spacers.  It's surprisingly useful even though it is mounted so low and the vibrations don't seem to be too bad.  The drivers mirror mounts on the fender near the windshield, but this places it so far away that the small mirror becomes nearly useless (too narrow a view).  To solve this I purchased a small convex mirror and with some simple double sided tape stuck it to the original mirror.  The end result looks completely stock and makes the mirror far more useful.  I think the end result is quite nice:

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