I'm going to post slowly until I'm up to date here .. I'm copying this content from a thread on another forum, mostly
Everything began in .. 2011, maybe? With me sitting in a friend's office and looking at his model Cobra; he said to me "How expensive could it be?" and we downloaded the price list for Dax .. quick calculations later suggested £25k and I'd be on the road!
I can hear you all laughing uncontrollably now.. optimistic isn't the word! But I digress. A trip to Detling (RIP) where I sat in a Dax, a GD, looked at a Viper and looked at the AK was followed by a trip to a Dax open day and a test run in their demonstrator (not a test drive!) and a trip to Crendon to meet JK and sit in a Crendon.
At the time I wanted to build a 'modern' Cobra, but over time that has turned into wanting a more period correct Cobra and I probably
should have bought a Crendon - but never mind, I committed to Dax… and so the story begins.
Early 2012 saw me road trip to deepest, darkest Wales to purchase an XJ40 donor off a man who declared "I hope you aren't going to break it for one of those kit cars, this car is too good for that!"
I can't even describe how optimistic he was! You could see daylight through the firewall, the pedal box was the only thing stopping the firewall from falling out in fact, the inner wings were completely rotten where the wiring looms passed through and so on! We ended up chopping the boot off with a plasma cutter so it would fit in the garage with the door shut, stripping it and waving goodbye to the rest - keeping the V5, of course! Amazingly, we only set light to it once with the plasma cutter.. and that was Kevin writing his initials in the rear wing, if memory serves!
If I were doing it again I'd just buy a donor pack... there was a
lot of swearing at rusty bits, but eventually all the required parts were liberated with no thanks to:
The front suspension arms on one side, which were stuck together and eventually liberated by drilling out a bolt:
The rear disc that the previous owner had put on in the wrong orientation, so you couldn't get to the handbrake adjuster. A 3-leg puller and lump hammer got the disc off eventually:
The swing bolts were well and truly recalcitrant, too, but finally the crusty diff was liberated:
Then, there was a break of a month or so while I waited for Dax to deliver the chassis and chassis packs, and I gathered other parts....