Is This the Beginning of the End or the End of the Beginning?

Just a quick post to let everyone know that the car is safely at the painter!  Everything went very smoothly.

Early Saturday morning I loaded the car on the trailer (I'm actually getting pretty good at it).

The biggest problem was that I woke up my next door neighbors when I started the engine at 7am.

The ride was about 100 miles over the George Washington bridge, through NY and up to New Haven.  It took about 2 hours and I was happy to get waves and thumbs-up along the way.  After about the first hour it got a lot easier and found myself only looking in the rearview mirror every 30 seconds.  Luckily, I avoided any traffic by going up there early on a Saturday morning.

When I arrived at the painter, I was really excited to meet him and see what else he was working on.  I rang the doorbell and was shocked to see one of my local Cobra buddies (from our monthly breakfasts) open the door!  He had earlier brought his car up there for some Spring polishing (I had never heard of that before) and was back that Saturday to pick it up.  His car is registered for the street but he had a trailer anyway so I helped him load his car and then it was my turn.  I was very proud when I jumped into the driver's seat, pushed the start button and heard the car roar to life.  I slowly backed down the ramp of the trailer and pulled the car into the workshop.  As you'll see in the pictures below, mine was in good company.

Here's my car in the shop.

Here are its cousins.

 (That's the painter in the background below.  He's a perfectionist! I know what some of you are thinking - that's the pot calling the kettle black)

You can see it the last picture that the body has been removed.  They'll be doing the same thing with my car.  Hopefully the bodywork will be completed in about 2 weeks and then they'll take the body off my chassis.  At that time, I'll take another ride up there to get the chassis and bring it back home to finish everything else.

I probably won't have too much to report for a couple weeks and then it's going to get CRAZY.

Where's the Heat?

It's hard to believe that back in October I had started to design the heating system.  This is what the original parts looked like

 And here is a prototype of what I wanted to build (it's standing on end in this picture)

Well, last week I finally turned my attention back to completing it.  The original design was close to what I wanted but I knew I had ignored a few details.  The main one was how to get it to provide heat both to the floor and to the defrosters like a regular car would have.  I knew I'd need to have some type of control to direct the airflow, but I didn't think I'd have room to add it on.  As usual, I sketched-out different ideas and tested a few -- finally I had my answer.

Here are the parts I fabricated.  The sides were enlarged so I could fit two outlets on each.  There's also a front, back, internal baffle, outlets and the heater core.

 Partially assembled.

 Here's the innovation.  I made internal gates on pivots that can rotate to close one set of outlets or the other.  The gates are connected by the rod that runs across the box so both move together.  This picture shows one side closed.

 And this picture shows the other side closed.

 There's also in internal baffle to make sure the air flow is directed through the heater coil.

 Here's a photo showing the heater core in position.  You can also see both gates.  By the way, the four outlets are there for driver and passenger floor heat and defrost.

Parts ready for final assembly.  Just to get to this point, I had already test fit the parts as least 20 times making small adjustments to eliminate air leaks and to get the gates to operate smoothly.

Assembled unit.

With blower motor attached.

Notice the lever below the two outlets.  This controls the internal gates.

Can someone tell me to comb my hair first!

There goes another week.  Making this heater was far more complicated than I imagined.  In the end, it probably won't even provide that much heat when I'm driving around in a convertible during the winter -- but I have the satisfaction of conquering a challenging engineering problem.

More importantly, I leave for the painter in two days!

March 24th

That's the date I take the car to the painter!  After researching and getting recommendations I decided on a painter who has experience with these types of cars.  The only problem is that he's in Connecticut!  I'm sure it will be an adventure.  And the only other problem is that he'll have the car for 8 weeks!

Here's what the car looks like now.

Over the last month, I've been getting the car ready for the paint shop. 

I had to drill some large holes in the body for a roll bar on the passenger side.  As you can imagine, I was nervous about drill 2 inch holes into the body.

Fortunately, it all worked out.

I installed the windshield (with some help from the pit crew).  I was nervous about this step too because I had read that if the windshield is twisted or has too much pressure applied to it, it will crack.  Follow the pictures to see what happened.

It took a lot of fiddling -- must have taken that windshield off and put it back on eight times to get it to fit right.  But it didn't break!

I also installed the windshield wipers -- sorry, no photos (but they look like windshield wipers).  Yes, I was nervous about this too since I had to drill more holes through the body.  Measure twice, cut once I always say.  In this case, I measured 20 times and cut once.  And after all that measuring, it seems like they'll work just fine.

I just realized as I'm writing this that I'll probably be nervous about every step from here on.  I can't even imagine working on the car after the paint is done.

I have a few other things to finish before next Saturday.  The main one will be to finish the heater.  It's so complicated, I'm going to devote a post just to that.

In closing, my Dad always says, "All work and no play makes Ralph a dull boy".  So here goes...