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[aaronjb]

When the group arrived and was well watered and rested, a 2000 metre assent of the Sierra Nevadas would be in order.

Then I'll definitely pass 

The pace quickened.. because I had an imminent house move approaching!

March 2016 saw the front suspension basically complete:


And me dealing with rust on the chassis due to poor prep prior to powder coating (despite WaxOyling the whole thing and the driveway several years prior):


Discovering that I had the wrong diff yoke of the two kinds available - central pinion and offset pinion - which was quickly rectified by a phone call to Dax. Here, showing the wrong one:


Building up the rear suspension and then realising that I needed to drill the extra hole in the rear hub carriers.. so un-building half of it again..


The third hole needs to be added top right, here, using the mounting tube on the De Dion beam as a guide:


And that just left the driveshafts, which were being recalcitrant:


The Haynes manual described disassembly of the driveshafts as follows:

Using a suitable socket just smaller than the bearing cup on the lower side and a tube just larger than the bearing cup on the upper side, drive the half shaft down so that the bearing cup is exposed.

Now grasp the bearing cup with mole grips and wiggle it free of the half shaft.

Turn over and repeat.

That’s all great in theory but what I found was that the bearing cups were so tight in their bores that there isn’t a big enough pair of grips in the world.

On the advice of a fellow forum member we welded a long M10 bolt to the bearing cup and used that plus a large socket to draw the cup out of the half shaft loops – that works very easily once you have the welder set up so you’re not either blowing through the cup or welding it so poorly that the bolt snaps free of the weld.



And, finally, wheels were added:

[Nick W]

Cool 

I knew they're used in pilgrim builds, but as we discussed before, they don't do big power.

the Jag diff is easily up to a tuned V12 with the suspension loads of a heavy car fed into it. Aaron's de-Dion rear on a car that's half the weight won't be bothered by any power level he can afford from an FE 

[henryd]

Cool 

I knew they're used in pilgrim builds, but as we discussed before, they don't do big power.

the Jag diff is easily up to a tuned V12 with the suspension loads of a heavy car fed into it. Aaron's de-Dion rear on a car that's half the weight won't be bothered by any power level he can afford from an FE 

Aye,the amount of torque applied will be limited by the tyres letting go at that weight

[aaronjb]

The Jag diff is easily up to a tuned V12 with the suspension loads of a heavy car fed into it. Aaron's de-Dion rear on a car that's half the weight won't be bothered by any power level he can afford from an FE 

Yea - 462cu in stroker kit (from Scat - new crank, rods, pistons etc) plus Eddy heads and intake with a 750cfm Holley is about the limit of my budget .. and even that is knocking on to the £10k mark, I think! Next up would be Blue Demon heads, forced induction etc.. but I think I'll be OK with the power levels I'll have

Trying to prepare for a house move, refurbishing the bathroom prior to moving out, taking a very long holiday (three weeks - one in Hawaii and two driving Route 66 - amazing!) nearly killed me, but with the help of my Dad I managed to get to the point where we could move house with it..

Shortened driveshafts were refurbished and fitted with new quality bearings:


Which meant that all four wheels could go on:


We temporarily mated engine and gearbox - note the spacers made out of 15mm copper tube due to the too-long input shaft:


I'll bet I sat in it and made brum noises here:


We also threw the 428FE together enough that it could be moved - the (scrap) crank is stopping the pistons from falling out .. but there aren't any bearing shells:


And then we fitted the body! Here's a top tip:

Don't try and fit the engine first and body later if you are using an FE! The exhaust ports won't clear the bottom of the footwells, so we ended up 'jacking' the footwells apart to clear and then letting them relax again once the body was over the engine. Such fun.


Finally everything got packed into a covered car trailer, hooked up to the back of my pickup (I still miss that pickup..) and dragged from Bracknell to Northampton to its new home:

[aaronjb]

After moving the car in summer 2016, I took the opportunity to do some measuring - like how much (or little) clearance to the bonnet and floor the car might have when all is said and done; the car is sitting on chassis trolleys at this point, so is higher than final ride height. Turns out that the air cleaner just clears the bonnet, and the sump .. well, that will just clear the floor:





Then there was much measuring while we figured out where the body needed extra trimming at the footwell corners to clear the chassis (same on both sides), and the engine came back out again:





The body got lifted into the rafters using an array of pulleys, and I set about making brake lines:

[aaronjb]

Before the rear brakes can go get buttoned up though, the rear toe needs to be set - it is set using shims between the hub and the De Dion beam; the hub mounts to the beam using the bolt holes that would originally have been used for the brake caliper hanger though, so once the brakes are on, changing the shims means un-mounting the calipers. Worse still, the calipers mount using threaded rod and nuts on both ends due to access issues.. so getting it all apart again in future is going to be a pain in the backside. Still, front & rear toe was set using lasers and long lengths of aluminium angle and a lot of trigonometry!

Rear toe setup:


Front toe setup:



All that just to get toe 'close enough'..


Front brakes went on easily enough - these discs are second hand but in good condition besides the surface rust and they can always be swapped out prior to IVA:


The rears gave me some trouble as I had the wrong set of brake hoses for these calipers. There are two kinds of Jaguar caliper and the brake fitting comes off at a different angle - just like the diff, I had the wrong combination of parts:


While the body was still off I took the opportunity to run the main battery cable. It passes through the factory made holes in the prop-catcher using two 35mm Lucas grommets split down the middle and super-glued in place:


Since my plans for the brakes involved separate master cylinders for front & rear, I couldn't use the standard Dax plan of two separate brake lines for the front and one line to the rears, splitting in the middle. Instead, I had the same setup for front & rear - a single line leaving the master cylinder, splitting in the middle of the chassis and going to each side. That meant that I could fit the brake light switch (pressure style) well away from sources of heat - time will tell if this stays or if I switch to a mechanical switch on the pedal box:


And that takes us up to March 2017..

[aaronjb]

Once I’d got hold of the correct Goodridge brake lines for the rear, the front & rear calipers could be attached - of course, looking back on these photos now I see that I did everything on the rear as though they’d never need to come off again, yet they will - you can’t bleed the brakes with the calipers attached as the bleed nipple is no longer at the “top” with the hubs mounted on their side like this.. Ah well, that’s a problem for a later day.

Fronts:


Rears:


The body was up and down more times than a <insert euphemism here> at this point, trimming, testing, trimming, checking, trimming and so on, using plum lines from the arches to make sure everything was ‘even’ side to side and aligned with the center of the hubs as best as is possible.

One interesting point to note - the build manual has you push the footwells up against the little vertical plates at the end of the chassis part of the footwell - the idea being that the pedal box will ultimately bolt through both the fibreglass footwell and the metal, but two things became apparent:

If we did that, the body was off-square by about a quarter inch at the front end, so the wheels would never be even
When the pedal box was offered up and placed, per the build manual, “as high up as possible”, the lower mounting holes would miss the metal plates in the chassis anyway!

Because of that we decided to make the body square on the chassis (or “more square”, perhaps I should say!) and then pack the footwell out with an additional strip of 3mm steel between the fibreglass and the steel chassis, allowing us to both fill the gap and raise the plate enough that the pedal box will bolt to steel at the bottom.

Eventually the body was attached using Würth adhesive and pop rivets per the build manual - thank heaven we had four people and two compressor driven pop-riveters at this point! There are no pictures because we were all too busy trying to finish riveting before the adhesive set..

You can just see what I described about the footwells in this image, before the packing plates were added:


The main tub with so many rivets. So. Many. Rivets:


And the boot, which needs in-fill plates to be added over the chassis rails left & right, and the cut-out section to be filled with the piece laying in the boot; that provides clearance for the De Dion beam and also contains a steel reinforcing strip as it is the front mounting point for the fuel tank straps:


Here’s the pedal box being offered up:


Shown here at its lowest possible point rather than where it will end up (as high as possible). I really, really wanted a bottom hung pedal box rather than the Dax one, but in the end I just couldn’t make one fit without sawing off a few inches of leg. Due to the design of the footwell the master cylinders can’t exit the footwell forward (because of the chassis box section), and having ‘rear facing’ cylinders means moving your feet upward into the steering column.. So, Dax pedal box it was. For now, I can always change it later, right?

I must have added the steering column somewhere around here, although I don’t have any pictures of the inside (the Corsa B ePas column), but here’s the intermediate shaft plus the bearing I installed (rather than the Dax bushing):


And one last picture for this update - we went to a show (I forget which one!) and bought a load of exterior lighting stuff as well as some lathe tooling and bits & bobs:

[aaronjb]

At the show I mentioned earlier, I also ordered something rather extravagant. It turned up in a very large box:


I had to call in reinforcements (my Dad!) because I couldn’t move it on my own.. Despite it being the “mobile” version:


As you can see, I’ve also fitted the front lights. These were LED versions which were rather expensive, and they “stuck out” past the chrome ring making the whole thing look like a Pug with a too-small head and eyes about to pop out.. A shame, really, as I rather like the idea of being able to see well at night. We’ll revisit those, later.

[Migv6 le Frog Fan]

Threads like this remind me why I have an interest in working on cars. Its great, keep it coming please.

[Sir Tigger KC]

Yes it's awesome! Thanks for sharing Aaron. 

[Field Marshal Dr. Opti]

Yes......very impressive.

If memory serves 462 cubic inches is seven point something litres.

Exactly what a Cobra requires.

[Webby the Bear]

Very impressed Aaron 👍👍👍

[aaronjb]

Thanks guys 

I'm slowly catching up to 'today' now..

May saw me working on the fuel system - running the fuel feed from the fuel tank ‘sump’ (such as it is) and out to the fuel pump via a pre-filter, then forward to the Filter King main regulator and filter.

Here you can see a fuel shut-off valve on the outlet of the tank, since removed. The tank outlet is a plain 1/2" barb with an AN-8 compression fitting with the hose being PTFE lined, nylon braided fuel hose from Torques on eBay:


That runs under the diff and then makes a left turn on the chassis rail, through the sintered pre-filter and then slightly upward (less so now as the pump has moved down a bit) to the JESUS CHRIST WHAT IS THAT NOISE Carter fuel pump:


Dax supply a Carter P4070 rated at 50gph, but I went with the P4600HP rated for 100gph to give me plenty of headroom should the engine need more fuel and I should be able to use it as a lift-pump to supply a high pressure pump if/when I go for EFI. Either way, the way I routed the fuel system lends itself to being ‘split’ either before or after this pump and re-routed fairly easily, even once everything is in the way.

The fuel line then loops back and runs through a bulkhead fitting that is in the prop-catcher loop beside the main +ve lead, and forward to the Filter King filter on the engine bay bulkhead:


The return hose shown here is now removed, but can be reinstated easily enough if/when I go for an EFI system that requires one. The fuel tank already has provision for an 8mm return line next to the outlet, but was also modified recently - more about that later.



Next, I set about designing the internal boot hinges.. When I say designing, I blatantly stole the design from a Cobra forum member

First I bought a set of MGF boot hinges, as I know those have been used previously, but mounting them on the DeDion chassis is complicated by the shock towers protruding into the boot area and their resulting in-fill plates, so I went back to a more ‘original’ style arrangement of a steel hoop with pivots. Here, I’m mocking up the pivot section in cardboard, having worked out the angle off-vertical for the hinge section and, therefore, the relative difference in lengths for each hinge plate. Hurrah for trigonometry!



Then a brief pause in work for a trip to Le Mans 2017 with some friends - the BMW is mine, the Hummer is what they came in, the tank is not with us :lol:


That was a bloody good trip..

[Varche]

Prop shaft catcher!

Lets hope you never have to use it for real.

[aaronjb]

Fingers crossed! The prop will be custom made by somewhere like Bailey Morris - it's all of about 9" long

What next? Well, I punched some big holes in the end of the footwell to try fitting a bottom-pivot pedal box from OBP Motorsport:


I ended up abandoning this idea, glassing the holes back up and reverting to the Dax pedal box - as I mentioned earlier, I just wasn’t able to get the pedals far enough down the footwell that I could comfortably use them; even though the pedal boxes are beautiful. Maybe I’ll come back to this idea one day .. again, the brake lines are designed to be ‘split’ and re-routed easily if I do.

Then there was a trip to Classics on the Common at Harpenden, where I saw a colour I’d love to pain the Cobra .. except unfortunately the owner of the truck didn’t know what colour it was:


I got back to fabbing the hinges for the boot lid again. I’m a self-taught welder, can you tell?


Remember - a grinder and paint, makes me the welder I ain’t!

In the end, I had something passable, though. Note that the hinges look on the piss ‘outward’, but once the steel strap is curved to match the inside of the rear deck, they will hang vertically again. Trigonometry success!




This looks simple here, but there was a lot of trial and error! The thing I realised was that the pivot point has to be a lot closer to the rear deck than you think in order that the boot lid will actually rise up and clear the opening without catching.. So there were at least two versions of this whole assembly..

Then we rescued a dog. He took up quite a bit of time and came with some behavioural problems being a 9 year old who’d had a hard life; but he settled, became best friends with one of our cats, never grew to like other dogs, loved cuddles, and I miss him terribly. He passed this year (March, 2019) somewhat unexpectedly from the big C.


Found his pictures scrolling through my Google Photos and had to include him..


Bernie (our tiny, 2.5Kg, female 6y/o cat) loved him, and he loved her.. Meg (our 5Kg, female 12y/o cat) did not love him!