My Cobra Build Site

A bit of a milestone here, I’m finally done with my rough in electrical for the car. I’m calling it a “rough in” since it’s pretty much the same as what you’d do on a house. All of the major components are there, and I can’t really do much more until some other stuff starts to come together like the aluminum, engine in, body on (lights), etc.

This weekend I was able to finish up pre-wiring for my linear actuators both front and back, pre-wiring for the trunk latch popper, and adding the LA switches. From there, I was able to get the dash all hooked up and clamped into place. The wires are a complete mess, but I’m not going to get into too much of a hurry cleaning it all up until the engine is back in, and I verify all of the related circuits.

The minor miracle of the day? Everything actually worked. ;-> My headlight reminder chime, my manual rear backup lights, foot activated hi beams, the linear actuator switches, foot box lights, door switches, and the extra complicated headlight and interior light setup, etc. Heck, even the indicator lights for the tangent running lamps, hi beams, and turn signals (with reminder buzzer) worked. Frankly, I was surprised.

So, the next step is even more exciting for me than this one…dropping the engine back in, and actually hooking up the driveshaft, etc. I’m currently on the cusp of having it actually move under it’s own power (still lots to do before that.)

I shot a video for wiring the linear actuators, and once I get it edited, I’ll post it here. Probably not that important for these builds since very few people would do them, but hopefully useful for someone.

Pics:

Wow, March 28 was my last blog entry…what a terribly busy Summer/Fall I had! I guess when you decided to do an entire landscape redo mostly alone, drop an 8000 pound skidsteer into the pool, rebuild the pool, then build a couple of decks, patios, etc., it takes some time.

But…I’m working my way back into the shop, and I’m thinking about all kinds of aspects of the build. In particular, even though I still have a ton of work to do with the paint and body, I’m still trying to nail down my color choice. I had decided fully to go Silver, but now, I am rethinking that. The primary reason is that although I love the silver cars, they are less “in your face” than some of the brighter colors. It’s a super-car, more or less, it’s supposed to be in your face right? Still thinking about orange, but maybe a true orange instead of pearl, white stripes. Then there’s yellow, green, and an old standby, black…

So, this week, I’ve been working on cleaning up the welds on my side pipes, so that I can get them sent off to the coater in Portland, and Mike M can help get them back to me.

It’ll take me a week to figure out what my wiring is doing, I should have mapped it better. I did somewhat, but didn’t take all of the time to diagram my custom circuits. I’ll need to do that.

I’m also thinking about using linear actuators for the trunk and hood, just because I think it would be cool, despite being not only a little “ghetto” and totally not original to the time period. But, using those will help keep hands off the paint when opening the trunk and hood. I can also use a different setup for the latches then, perhaps borrowing an old “caddie” power latch or something.

Here we go!