Late night painting the roadster.

It's been a tough week - being crunch time at work and crunch time on the cobra. Earlier this week Josh and I built a make-shift paint booth for proper ventilation. A sweet 2x4 frame with painters plastic stapled to the wood. It's so big that it takes 2 people to close the garage door. One person to bend back the main 2x4 so the door will clear and one person to close it.

Also earlier this week we sanded back the clear coat and removed all the 'trim' from the cobra. Removing the rollbars was especially fun...Last night we taped it and cleaned it up and Josh painted it. We laid on the stripes - Josh painted them - then we pulled the tape and sprayed the clear.

I took a few pics of the process last night with my camera but didn't get home until well after 1am so I took one with my phone so I could post it up today. Consider it a teaser pic - you can see the ghost stripes if you look very closely between the picture's grain. Hopefully next week we'll cut & polish it and reassemble everything. At that point it will be 'done' and anything else I do to it will be enhancements to a final product.

Mountain Trip

Diana and I took a trip to the mountains with Brandon and Allison last weekend. Brandon and I went up a few hours before the girls so we could drive the mountains. We (read: I) had a few car problems I had to work out, and the weather stopped us once so we got there later than we would have liked. We did get in one really good ride even though it started raining on the way back.


Following Brandon on the dirt road wasn't the best. When we first got to it, it was dry and extremely dusty. Then my side pipe fell most of the way off and was dragging the ground occasionally. I didn't realize it had fallen most of the way off so I was just driving REALLY slow thinking that the dinging sound was rocks being kicked up. After we fixed that problem, we made pretty good time up the mountains, but I still breathed in a LOT of dust and dirt.

The scenery was AWESOME and we had a great time. We'll be heading up there again soon. I would have enjoyed some cruising along the blue ridge pkwy.

Side Pipes

I know it's been awhile since a post on here, but things are slowing down a bit with the car being almost done. I did have some exciting stuff happen today that I should write about.

A few weeks ago I took the cobra in to Merchant tire to get it aligned. They said the pipes hung down too low to get it on their machine. They were gonna try to get some ramps or something and call me back. Well, last night Brandon and I pulled the side pipes off and painted them with some semi-gloss barbeque paint. Since I had the pipes off today, I took off a little bit early from work so I could run out to Merchant and have it aligned between rain showers.

They still had to run out to home depot to get some planks of wood to keep from scraping on the bottom. But I got a little discount for going in there all the time. It's all about who you know, not what you know. Such a true statement. The car feels good with the new alignment. I'm pretty excited about it. I actually had it pretty close by eyeball. Everything was withing acceptable spec except for the toe which was off by 5/8".

Well, this afternoon Josh came out and brought over a spare J-pipe for the flange. I cut the flange off with a cutting wheel and Josh welded it on to extend my pipes a little out from the body. We mounted everything up and installed the heat shields. I think it really looks much better.

$5 Rides

Had a pretty busy, but great weekend. Went to a smallish car show Saturday morning to meet up with my buddy, Trey. He has a 91 porshe 911 that I've been wanting to check out. While I was showing him the Cobra lots of folks came over and took pictures and asked questions. I wasn't trying to be part of the car show, but hey whatever! It was kinda nice.

After that I limed, fertilized, and seeded the lawn with Diana. I had a gig that evening at Ruckus. It wwent pretty great and we had a good time. I didn't get home until 3:30 though so it was pretty exhausting. Sunday morning I got up and headed to Greensboro in the cobra. Most of mom's side of the family was there to check out the car. A bunch of folks went for rides including Uncle Mac, grandma, mom and dad.

Because the car doesn't have polish on it yet, it's very static electric and pollen just sticks to it!

Drove back to Raleigh, made dinner and went to sleep.

Louvers done

I was really getting annoyed not having the side louvers in since without them you can see inside the engine bay and can view all the siliconed up seams and whatnot. So after work today, I got those installed and got the rear splashguards done. I also sealed up a few places that road debris was making it into the cabin from.

Windshield wipers - successful test!

So, according to weather.com there was a 0% chance of rain until 10pm. Diana and I hit up a movie at the colony theater (20 miles away in raleigh). As you have probably ALREADY guessed. It started raining when we left. Successful test of the windshield wipers. Believe it or not we really didn't get too wet. At highway speed the windscreen blocked most of the rain. BUT - the rain that went in the hood scoop got sucked up into the heater motor and blew in the vents. So we had to turn the heater off...DOH. I'll have to fab up some kind of shield around the heater air intake. Also, I really need to install the rear splashguards because rocks are getting in my trunk somehow! And I really want to install the side louvers because it looks like crap being able to see in to the footbox.

Roadworthy? Maybe... Street legal? Yes!

This morning I got up with State Farm and they were happy to give me exactly the policy I needed. After that, I went and got the plates.

I had left my car on after testing out the windshield wipers so I had to take my battery in and get it charged. BUT THEN FINALLY, I got home and slapped the plate on the roadster and took it for a drive. It was awesome! AWESOME. Everything I had hoped for. It handles excellently, and even more importantly very predictably. Of course it's fast. I drove around close to home a bit and eventually took it out to band practice in north raleigh. I was a little afraid to drive it that far, but I had no problems. Got home and took my wife out for a late dinner.

Too bad it's supposed to run for the next several days! I still have a lot left to do, but things are winding down now :-) Oh I almost forgot, on the way home from dinner, a cop caught up to me on the road. I got over to let him pass (since he was going faster than me) but he slowed down and matched my speed just behind me. He got beside me at a light and backed up so he could read my plate (I guess). I was a little nervous that maybe my speedometer was uncalibrated or something, but I guess he was just running my plate. He did a U-turn at the next block so I guess everything is legit :-)