It was an unusually gorgeous day in New England today. While a beautiful sunny spring day can’t be beat, today was really more of a summer day. 80 degrees, bright sun. It was a great day to open the garage up and work on the car. (And, in case anyone thinks I missed out on getting outside today, I also had a big basket of fried seafood for lunch, out in the sun on a picnic table!)
I continued doing more of the interior work, now that the parts I ordered last weekend from McMaster showed up.
As I sat down to write a post for this site today, which I haven’t done in a few weeks, I realized that it’s now been over three years that I’ve been working on this car. Thinking back over the other events in my life that have happened during that time, its just drives home how long of a period of time that really is. In a few months I’m going to be driving the car for the first time down to my fourth Open House at Factory Five.
And, of course, its still not done. At least its legal and drivable now. The last few weeks have been more about driving the car than about working on the car. With the unusually nice streak of weather in mid-March, I decided to permanently take the Miata out of the garage for the season, and get the Cobra set up to be able to drive. After getting it moved, and off the wheel dollies, I looked it over and took it for a couple drives. I’m up to about 90 miles on it now!
The weather has shifted back to more seasonable coolness, and the rain seems to be never-ending, so I decided to take advantage of a period of a couple weeks of both lots of predicted rain and other plans and take the interior of the car back apart to take care of some loose ends.
It was really a spectacular weekend, in the weather department, so finding some time to work on the car wasn’t all that easy, but I did manage to spend a few more hours working on the center console. Both yesterday and today I also debated moving the car back to the “active” side of the garage so I could take it for a drive, but its still really early in March and I know I’d just be jinxing myself if I moved the car and could no longer park the Miata in the garage. We’d probably get three feet of snow.
I found some more time today to work on the car, although being Valentines day, I had to balance car work and sleeping on the couch tonight. I spent a good three hours in the garage, though, and did manage to get some more work done on the center console.
Another lucky miss in the weather department this week meant I could get the Miata back out of the garage again yesterday. I took advantage of that today to spend another part day working on the center console. The devil is in the details with this project, and its definitely a bigger job than I was expecting it to be.
I picked up some parts and got some work done on the switch panel. I expect to get a bit more work done tomorrow, as well.
This turned out to be another good weekend to work on the car. We went another week without any snow, so I was able to leave the Miata out of the garage and didn’t have to put everything away that I’d been using last weekend with the work on the emergency brake.
I wanted to continue the work on the center console, hopefully actually getting something fabricated this weekend. This is definitely a task that can easily chew up massive amounts of time in planning. Its easy enough to cut more parts, so I figured it was best to just start cutting.
Today was definitely a car day — I started off going up to Pat McMahon’s shop where we had a mid-winter “Cobra” get-together (although it was too cold for anyone to actually drive their car there). Coffee, donuts, good conversation and free parts. You can’t go wrong with that. I actually came back with a few items I will find useful — a bus bar I can use for a better set of grounds behind the dash, some battery cable boots (which I needed, as I had none on my battery or alternator lines), and best yet another set of the decals I had bought to use as icons for my dash and console switches. I needed an extra set, but balked at paying another $20 for the one extra sticker I needed.
After returning home, I got to work on the car — I was planning on playing with some emergency brake arrangements, and starting to build the center console.
Having had an office party fairly late last night, I took today off to just relax. I decided to pull the Miata out of the garage for the weekend, and fired up the heat so I could do some work on the car. I’m still trying to find a place to do the body work and painting, but I do have things to do beyond that, as I said in my last post.
I decided I wanted to get the center console worked out and perhaps fabricated this weekend. That’s my kind of work on a lazy day — mostly sitting around staring at the car trying to visualize how I wanted it to both look, and go together.
Its been a couple months since I’ve posted anything on here. As any of you who have looked at the live camera has likely seen, I took advantage of not having the body buck in the garage this winter to be able to move things around and park my Miata in there, too. The upside of that is that its immensely easier to snowblow my driveway, but the downside is that its harder to do work on the Cobra.
I just crossed fifty miles on the car tonight. I got the car drivable late enough in the season that there is no way I’m going to get a few hundred on it before getting it painted, as my original planning was. Its still got the oil leak, and trying to communicate via e-mail, I’ve just not had enough time lately to deal with arranging to get it back to Fortes to get the leak taken care of. That said, the leak (while awfully messy under the car) isn’t bad, the oil level isn’t dropping noticeably, so I’ve still be driving it.