Enjoying The Fruits Of My Labour & Other Things.

With the Cobra now at the stage of being fun to drive I entered into my first official Cobra Car Club event. The club was to meet at Little Creatures Brewery in Geelong for morning tea then head to Queenscliffe Brewhouse for lunch. As alway wanting to look our best, a clean up was required.

The car was still untried at this stage but the 60klm round trip was trouble free and

presented for a photo opportunity outside the old Queenscliffe Fort.

One of the things that was occurring was the car would stall at the intersections on a regular basis so I made arrangements with Bullett Performance Racing to do a dyno tune and sort any issues that may arise. I was quite impressed with the results that a little bit of tweaking can produce.

Adjusting the cam timing resulted in a 22RWHP increase. One area that the tune did highlight was the need for a cold air box. The temperature of the air flowing into the intake was 41°C and that needs to be reduced to below 30°. I will endeavour to make a cold air box soon. An adjustment in the idle spreed has solved the bulk of the stalling issues but their is still a gremlin to be found.

I have gained a lot of confidence in the car and drive it when ever I can so when the clubs annual Alpine Run came up I thought that this will really sort it out. Once again, another big clean up.

The Alpine Run covers about 1300 klm up through the Victorian Alpine region and takes in some beautiful scenery and great winding roads. We had quite a spirited run up Mt Hotham which is about 30klm of winding roads which was a lot of fun. The temperature on the day was 32°C and the coolant and oil was on 103° so we stopped on top of Mt Hotham for a cool down, not that the car needed it but I did. Not having power steering added to the effort. Pics below.

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I am experiencing some movement in the rear suspension so we will have a look at that soon, more to come.

On The Road At Last.

It has been a while since my last post but I finally got the Cobra to a point where I wanted to drive it and check the steering and brakes and make sure everything was working. I had an unregistered vehicle permit that allows me to test drive for up to 28 days, this can only be used for the purpose of testing.It gave me the opportunity to get everything set up as best I could

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.

All The Fiddly Bits

I arranged to have the suspension aligned and to get the camber and caster correct. The steering was so heavy I could barely turn the wheel. Prior to the alignment I had to locate the front wheel central in the wheel arch, they were sitting back about 12mm and looked odd

These pics don't really show the change as well as I would like but that small amount made all the difference. The alignment helped with the steering making it quite pleasant to steer, still a little heavy but ok.

It was time to take the car on it's first test drive so I bought an Unregistered Vehicle Permit and took it out on the road being not very confidant with it as the brake were not bedded in and running temperatures had not been checked however, most things went well apart from a constant clunking in the back. These are some of the picks I took on the day.

When I got back home I investigated the clunking in the back and it turned out to be the shocks knocking together.

To solve this problem I made new brackets with the pivot pin hole moved out 5mm per side and with the bell cranks over centre the shock pull apart instead of colliding.

Just to be sure about the shocks, I places a plastigage on the adjusting knobs and took the car for a 30klm drive then came back home and the gage indicated no closing of the shocks. The orange blob on the shock is the plastigage.

The door seals were fitted at this time also and that stopped a lot of rattles and noise.

For what it's worth, fitting the seats is quite difficult as the bolt from under the car and are hard to line up with the holes. A little trick I did was to get two bolts 75mm long and cut the heads of them. These are then screwed into the seat frames and form guide pins that go right through the floor. Just fit the two clear bolts then remove the two pins and everything is alined, saves a lot of time.

I guess a service station will be a regular visit

for my Cobra.