I reckoned I had it ready for a roadworthy certificate and all that was needed was the sun visors fitted. This is an easy job to fit the brackets and force a curve in the visor to follow the contour of the windscreen. A real trick here is to shorten the screws that attach the brackets to the windscreen frame as in most cases they are too long and will hit the screen and crack it. I fitted the brackets and the visors and was giving the screws a final tighten and yes, a crack appears in the screen, screws were obviously not shortened enough. This little error cost $650.
Next was getting a roadworthy certificate. The tester had some phone discussions with VicRoads and sent a heap of photos to them and they rang back and said it was ok to test even with the live side pipes. The Cobra passed the test with flying colours.
I spoke to our Cobra Club signatory and provided all the details he required and he forwarded the documentation to take to my VicRoads branch and within 15 minutes I was walking out with a set of brand new club plates.
What a buzz to go home and fit the plates. I took the Cobra to Torquay once the plates were fitted and it run like a dream.
The Pace kit came with a set of front brake ducts that had to be fabricated from the high impact plastic mouldings they supplied. I decided to make these up and fit them to see how they would go. The ducts start as a formed sheet.
I cut out the mouldings and using glue, screws and clamps put them together to form the ducts.
To make these work, they are cut in half then to length and profiled around the duct inlet and using existing screw locations they are fixed in position.
Having gained some confidence in the car I took it for a run to Camperdown in Victoria's Western District using country roads. This sure gave the suspension a work out with all four tyres rubbing inside the guards at times caused by some pretty serious dips in the road. This was a 250klm round trip and apart from the tyre clearance, everything went well. Fuel consumption was around 10lt/100klm which for a 5.0 Coyote is not bad.
There is no better site than a Cobra in the street.
The catalytic converters were generating a lot of heat and being so close to the master cylinders I decided to reinforce the existing insulated cover with some aluminium heat shield that I had, I believe this works well for the turbo boys.
I wanted to get the car dyno tuned which required the installation of extra O2 bungs in the cats so the diagnostic gear could be plugged in. This took longer to get the cats out than it did to fit the bungs.
The passenger seat tub was hard back against the rear bulk head and would make it difficult to get the carpet in, the passenger seat did not have seat runners installed. To get the seat forward the required 16mm meant drilling additional holes through the floor and shear plates and that soon became a non option. A friend had a set of seat runners with the mounting nuts welded on the wrong side which he gave me. A few small mods and the runners were inverted and fitted to the seat. I can't use an adjusting lever as it now works the wrong way and we don't have the space but with the help of a screw driver I was able to get the runners in the right position and the problem is solved. Using the seat runners meant I was able to discard the 25mm aluminum risers which made the seat installation difficult.
In the next episode we will see the dyno and the car on the road.
Cheers Russell.
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