Enough Dithering

Well readers. You’ve probably lost all thoughts of another update ever making it’s way here... fear not, I’m just being terribly slow at updating this, the work continues. There has been quite a bit of vascillation on one topic. Namely colours. This has lead to procrastination in actually getting the car ready for painting. No colour choice, no need to paint... except the thought of living with battleship grey gelcoat any longer has spurred us into action. (Some parties have been quoted as saying they are now fond of said battleship grey. Definitely time to act!)   Which brings us neatly to this.

 

Yes, monday week ago the Cobra was loaded onto a man with a trailer thing, and taken to the paintshop.

 

Popped into the oven on arrival to dry out - and a low bake to pull anymore air bubbles under the gelcoat out so that the base material is fully stable for prep and paint.

 

 

Getting covered up ready for the machinery to come out and start blocking down ready for filler coat.

 

Back into the paint booth having been blocked and prepped - the ridges from the mould all treated and rubbed down and then filler coat will be sprayed on.

 

After tthat will be sand down, then high build primer, then colour, gloss, possibly a bit more paint, and some more gloss... all will be revealed. 

 

Will take about 4-5 weeks and we’re one week in. Very exciting!

 

What a relief..!

Yes, it's been referenced before dear readers but it's time for some relief. The dreaded oil pressure relief valve thing. You may remember that I've already managed to clonk the current sump (hereby referred to as Oil Pan. It's an American thing) on a speed hump on our road (unadopted before anyone calls me out re road tax, IVA, legalities etc). Now this wasn't helped by the suspension naturally settling down a bit and me not noticing, but the original pan is very deep too.  

So the task is this. Remove the Camaro LS pan (known as muscle car pan) and replace it with the Corvette LS pan. Which oil half the depth (has a bit less oil capacity but the internal baffling is better to prevent oil starvation) and therefore is a much better option for speed bumps. The maximum allowable in the U.K is 4 inches.

 

However. Here's the big but.

 

Because I'm using the clever shut off 4 cylinders when cruising and variable valve timing engine with some more complicated and sensitive innards, the Camaro pan has an oil pressure relief valve embedded within it (in addition to the one be the oil pump) to help regular oil pressure. 

 

The Corvette one does not.

 

 So the first job is the drain the oil and remove the old oil pan... and then try and work out where the oil pressure valve feed point is in the oil circuit.

 For reference this above is the lovely (clean) new Corvette pan. Whilst below this is the lovely not so clean Camaro pan. Now even a 4 year old would be able to play spot the difference here. Yes, that cheeky upstanding cyclopsy cylinder is the oil pressure relief valve.... and it's mounted on a lot more aluminium than is available in the Corvette pan. A challenge.

And below, said relief valve as extracted from it's initial home. Of course, I could throw caution to the wind and say it won't be needed or I'll stick with the hump clumping old pan but neither option really in my nature... nor to I want to blow the internals the first time I press the loud pedal on the open road.

 

 

 Above you can see where the valve feed needs to come from, effectively the outer chamber - anywhere from within there as the oil filter seal seats against the wider flat ring, so anywhere inside that should do the job. The main thing is how to angle and position to get enough thread to seal and hold (and this is in soft aluminium remember) and also how NOT to get the top of the valve which protrudes into the crankcase, to get hit by the first turn of the crank! Much geometry and problem solving ahead I think.

 So, the good news is this; given that the oil pans are both designed to fit onto this engine block and that the bolt patterns and overall design where the pans meet the engine is identical, with a bit of triangulation I'm able to transfer the position of the valve from the old pan to where it would be in the new one.

 

Therefore as long as the seating of the valve is in that position window and preferably lower then I should be in with a shout of getting this right first time. 

 

Above I drilled and tapped a pilot hole to accept a bolt which I then used as a test to ensure that with the right height of the valve etc that all was positioned correctly. Below shows this clearly.

 

Then it was over to my friendly car enthusiast engineer neighbour's workshop to drill and tap to the right size and mill a flat shoulder for the valve to seat down on. No photo of that though, I forgot.

 

With a new oil pan there is a need to fit the corresponding accessories such as the oil pickup tube, dipstick and most importantly the windage tray which stops the oil pan turning into a giant food processing when all the rotating gear is whizzing round at 5500rpm. This helps the oil collect in the pan where the pickup grabs it for the next journey round the engine as opposed to it trying to suck up bubbles from a maelstrom... we all know that sound children make with straws at the bottom of a glass don't we?

 

The windage tray fitted the only way to test the valve position is with the oil pan fitted too. This of course presents a challenge around being able to actually observe what's going on. Here's where a smart phone comes in. Equipped with a handy video camera, light and being small I shut my phone (mostly in a bag to protect from dripping oil) in the bottom of the engine, bolted it up and turned the crank over by hand a few times to record the view... and from the above you can se a bit of interference of the valve (mid rhs) against the windage tray.  Thankfully there was plenty of clearance against the crank which was my main fear so it's all good.  

 Surgery time it is then...

 Avoiding getting any stray particles on the tray I opted for the operating theatre look for the windage tray (and as we know operating theatre staff have all sorts of footwear so my old trainers fit the part too :-) 

Shot of bottom end above before windage tray went back on. Lots of metal to spin round very fast. 

 Above, windage tray, oil pickup and new dipstick (lhs) fitted.

 Finally new oil pan on... and introducing the duct scoop... bottom of the bell housing now protrudes below the oil pan. I've made a small aluminium angle shim cover for that and it's all buttoned up.

 

Thankfully that's a big and potentially difficult job done - engine runs fine so on to the next thing.

 

   

Bootlight

More wiring knitting and chaos in the boot. Hmm. This app for blogging isn't allowing me to crop photos.  Ok, so the boot light is there already. Installed and working. I've put it on a manual switch so that it's not coming on all the time but just when needed. I.e when I've broken down, somewhere in Europe, on a dark night, raining (probably) and I need to find a particular spanner. Or hammer. To hit something with. (To make it work again obviously)

Boot light. So another photo of a light.  I think I may have been a moth in a previous life. Or just small demonstrable victories are so rare that one feels the need to cling onto it before a dark patch of no progress starts again.

 I'm making a switch panel to hide where the battery is as it's ugly, plus mount the battery kill switch, boot light and also a couple more of the charging /power sockets too.

So this is what takes the time. Once you've wired up, cut and attached most items you realise that somehow in the mean time the wiring loom has taken on the same look as a old school telephone cord... yes kids, from the days before phones fried our brains with microwaves and 'wireless'... although that's what my grandparents called the radio. Which came before tv. arhhh. Whatever.

 

 

So after the loom was disconnected, fad back through all the routing and bulkhead holes, untwisted and fed back through again I chould then start sticking (using epoxy) the cable tie mounting points for the loom attachement. No sticky pad backings please note IVA person. All bonded permanently with epoxy. And any with large loom duties are fibreglass bonded in to body for good measure.  

Battery shut off switch mounted into beginnings of panel - not much room to spare behind but this will do nicely.

Alternator Panel completion

So, Anyone who can remember as far back as when we put the body shell on might remember that there was a bit of a squeeze near the alternator (front left/nearside of the engine) against the front inner wing. Talking to AK this needed resolving if not for aesthetics then technically it's not great for it to be resting against the stainless cladding. The way to resolve this is to cut a hole in the wing and the cladding and then put a backing plate on the other side of the wing to fill the hole to stop rubbish being thrown into the alternator from the tyre. I was also going to use this as a mechanism to pull the wing into shape a bit more as I have had a niggling feeling that I wasn't brutal enough with the cladding on that side (it was the first one) when I was bending it into shape.

View inside the wheel arch of the alternator hole cover plate.

 

 

View from inside the wing of plate filling up hole. Couldn't clean up the edge of the cladding that much as it's a bit tricky to get to but this is fine.

 

Fog and Reverse Lights

Welcome back readers... is it nearly a year since the last post? Possibly. I have not been idle during this time, more getting on with things and then not wanting to sit down and write about it.     However, having been sent on a mission abroad with work (read training course in th US) involving a long flight, and two weeks of hotel downtime in the evenings I thought this was the ideal to get my act together and catch up on the news.   So, we last left it that I was fiddling about with electrics and general wiring stuff on lights.     The next not insignificant task was to sort out the rear fog light and reverse lights positions. Some people go for a more temporary clamping of them to the nudge bar in a more relaxed manner, some take drastic steps and mould them into the rear vallance itself  by cutting the GRP, and then building up a profile with filler and shaping by sanding... after my trepidation with cutting the (not much seen) sections for heater and tunnel you'd be right in thinking that the latter option is not for me!   In addition, given how cavalier other every day drivers are towards not bumping their cars in car parks, the decision is relatively simple. Nudge bars both front and rear, and permanent mountings for the fog and reverse light on the nudge bar. This allows the hight and position of them to be compliant with IVA and as I'm mounting them between the bars, they will be reasonably discreet and protected.

 

Timber mock up time - making stuff in wood to test the practicality of mounting design makes life so much easier. Then I created some stainless mounting blanks and then using the bench grinder to round them off to suit the profile of the nudge bar section. Of course, more stainless polishing was required.

I made a jig to help with the next bit - welding the lugs to the stainless wasn't going to be that easy. On reflection I wished I'd practiced a bit more but the end result worked out ok once cleaned up.

Next its just a case of locating where the cables will feed through the edge of the boot /boot floor join and that job is finished.  

Lighting and Dash part 2

Ok, these updates are really getting behind. Job change with work and just wanting to get on with the build as opposed to talking about it is my excuse.

So where were we? 

I ordered the gauges back in Novemeber to take advantage of a Black Friday special discount front Speedhut. Due to my non standard approach of using the OEM Engine ECU  and having John at Speartech keep the canbus cabling in for gauge use I can then keep all the OEM sensors on the engine and therefore use the OEM output for gauges.

Speedhut do a great set of products that include GM canbus gauges that can be customised totally to your design. This is what turned up mid January....

First impressions count and these are packed really well and look excellent quality. I had them add the km/h to make obeying French speed limits easier when abroad. I also had their branding removed, and kept the font/gauge styling pretty similar to the original Smiths gauges. 

The other joyous things with this system is that all the gauges daisy chain the ECU signal between them, so it's one signal connection, power and lighting and then you get this...

The lights are on...

And below with the engine running too

At this point a work colleague seeing the above photo said... Those look like my old Golf mk3 gauges and the penny dropped... I've replicated my old VW Passat 4-Motion gauges with the blue and red scheme. Hmm. How to get out of this with least embarrassment? No answer. They are extensively easy on my eyes and I'm happy. Move on.

So after much measuring and fiddling about, the above arrangement is my final that I'm happy with and its time to start cutting the glass fibre again :-(

This measure a gazillion times and cut once might just have something to it though...

And after a short but necessary work trip to Houston Texas (great V8 soundtrack out there though) and the above is achieved. The masking tape tabs are mimicking the material thickness of dash covering. 

And back in situ and all lit up. I think I like this look a lot!

Next up my other Black Friday purchase that I ordered at the same time to be discussed - the oil pan swap!

Shiny Stuff part 3

Yes, there is no end to how much shiny stuff you can have on a Cobra! There might even be a part 4.

Now, unknown to you readers I have been spending a fair bit of time deliberating over screws. Yes it's possible I have one or more loose ones however until that's proven just bear with me.

The roll bar legs need escutcheons where they pass through the body. These escutcheons are very shiny pieces of stainless steel. Having eventually decided on the size (heads big enough to cover the countersinking but retro flat blade drive) the trick was then to get them to look right.

As they come these screws are a bit dull.

Compared to the shiny escutcheon definitely needs work.

So holding my 20 year old drill in the vice with polish stuff and a bit of prep work with 400 grit wet and dry with wd40 to lubricate and hey presto...
 

Shiny screw heads!

And a few more...

And a lot more!

Finally now all packed up below. I'm now at that stage that once something is fitted it then comes off again ready for paint as these things won't go on again until final assembly time.