A careful couple of minutes of filing made sure it ran freely. On the outrun to the back of the engine of the cable I mounted two rubber P-clips to guide the cable across.

I think I’ll put some shields on top of the valve covers later on, which can then neatly hide the cable from sight.

As said earlier, I would rather have the electronic throttle valve, but for safety reasons that’s not allowed.

In the batch of parts I collected last week, I got the correct length drive-belt. Installing this is also a job of two seconds. The coverage on the pulley isn’t that big, but the belt only has to drive the  alternator, so it should be ok.

Startmotor can be bolted on now I have the correct length of the bolts. It’s pretty close to the exhaust, I could not even get it assembled without removing the header, so the starter will probably need some heat shielding. 

On to the front, there are six bolts on the suspension which need their head drilled for the lock-wire. Mostly a patience job, making sure the bit gets cooled properly and preventing to much pressure on it. 5 bolts went fine, during the sixth the drill-bit broke. As such that isn’t a disaster, you count on the smaller bits to break soon, but the bit got stuck in the bolt! The bolts are jaguar specific and as such a rip-off (around the € 10,- mark I believe). Having no choice, I ordered a new one.

Having the bench drill now is essential, a hole like below just would not be possible by hand. (1.5mm hole, 2.5mm finish)

Back to the back again. The handbrake mechanism comes with two extra helper springs which somehow need to be attached to the chassis. There are two or three locations which would be suitable, but only one of them was reachable with the rivet tool I have. It remains scary to drill holes in the chassis.

At the right bottom you can see the black dot of a more preferable location (it pulls on the spring straight instead of in a slight angle), but unreachable for my tool.

The gearbox was the bottleneck for delivery, (Tremec == GM so that may have something to do with it). It is here now but still without a flywheel and clutch assembly, so the only thing I can can do with it is temporarily mount it on the adapterplate and bell-housing and put it away for a while until the other bits arrive.

And finally, the modified thermostat outlet. I’m going to polish that a bit later on to smooth out the welds a bit. Also, there are basically 2 ways to mount the outlet. Shown here is the one where the outlet is most ‘outwards’. If the outlet is turned 180 degrees it moves a bit inwards. When the engine goes in the chassis I’ll have to revisit this too, judging what’s best at that time.

In one of the drawers at speedon Mischa found something that could fit, and with a bit of effort, it indeed did.

(apologies for the blurry picture) With a bit of sanding on both parts, i.e. the cable and and the bracket, made it fit.

The ECU has arrived too with a nice semi-assembled harness. Now I need a handful of connectors and I should then be able to construct a complete harnes and finish that part.

Again, I have to applaud Gardner Douglas for their ‘fit’. The differential and the chassis get together by 8 bolts, 6 of which drop in pretty easily and the rear two need a little flexing of the diff cage; exactly as outlined in the build video.

Today I rolled the chassis to the garage of a nearby friend. It will stay there for the next week while work is being done in the garage. My girlfriend did take some pictures of the cobra’s maiden voyage. Alas, there was no card in the camera, so no pictures of that. (Not that it was that spectacular anyways.)

The trip, however small, was useful though. You get all sorts of information you do not get by keeping the chassis static. Here’s what I learned in 300 meters rolling the car from one garage to the next:

• the routing of the brakeline needs rethinking, on full steer it touches the tires; (I imagine it will be even worse with the wider wheels which will be fitted)
• there was a slight ‘tick’ at the rear left (hand-)brake caliper, could be the brake-pad;
• old tires, all different and a suspension not setup make for a crappy ride;
• it is very easy to lose nuts and bolts if they are not tightened;
• inertia of moving mass is easily underestimated;

So, not much to do for the next week but nag with my suppliers for delivery of the gearbox, which seems to be the bottleneck in the delivery. The gearbox fit also determines the precise length of the propshaft (so I’ve been told), so partial delivery also doesn’t make sense either. Patience…

So, that means we’ll need to clear out the whole garage, again, and having some wheels on the chassis makes that a whole lot easier. Ideally I want to have the suspension set-up completely by that date, but we’ll see.

One thing I noticed at the front was that the damper bracket opening was a bit smaller than the one on the left. This is probably caused by the welding process which puts strain on the metal and causes it to bend. We’re talking 2 milimeters I think. With a piece of thread and two M12 nuts I carefully widened the bracket a bit, just enough to get proper clearance on the damper.

Apart from one bolt I’m missing for the front (the one I had got damaged somehow) I’m also going to need two pieces of brake pipe for connecting the flexible hose to the front calipers. Looking at most other GD builds and the pictures I have from GD, the routing often does not make sense to me, so I’ve experimented with some different configurations. Basically, there are 2 things to vary:

1. the positioning of the donor bracket (upside down / normal);
2. routing of the flexible brake hose, what I’ve called ‘north’ and ‘south’.

Positioning the bracket seemed to quickly lead to the ‘upside down’ solution for me (see also Simon’s post, although he reaches the opposite conclusion)

Next, the routing of the flexible brake hose. The ‘northbound’ routing seemed to work best for me. It does not come anywhere near any suspension part, neither in full bump, full droop and at both extremes of the steering.

I find that another advantage of the northbound route is that the routing of the fixed piping is greatly simplified, just needing a short piece with two bends, instead of routing it through the caliper openings.

It may of course be the case I’m missing something completely, as the setup with the upside down bracket and the northbound routing of the hose is basically different than everyone elses setup?

I double checked the torque on the drive shaft nu and got a helpful email from Terry about it too. Torqued it to 136Nm and put in the cotter pin.

The overview Terry sent me had torque numbers for the diff cover nuts as well, so out came the nord-lock washers again and the torque wrench. Probably not that important, but alas, looks nice at least.

Last job was deciding wether to fit the flimsy covers for the drive shafts. General consensus on the fora was a big no-no, so that made the decision a bit easier.

So, rear end done! All that’s left now is to fit it to the chassis. (Likely I’ll come up with new jobs for it soon, but my list is empty for now)

Starting with the original 5 shims (although I think the original shims were of different thickness) turned out to be ok. I also started with the original setup of 3 shims to the front and 2 shims at the back. This gave me a 4.4° on the left side and 5.0° on the right side of the car.

Leaving the left side of the car alone, I moved all 3 shims to the back and that gave me 4.5° on the right side.

Should be close enough for now. The measurement is sort of ‘an estimate of what it should be’ at the moment. It does not really matter what the castor is (within reason obviously) as long as both sides are equal, we should be good to go. (Not that I have hands-on experience with this, it’s all theory for me still)

I’ve got a bit of a routine by now for the final assembly of a part of the car. Roughly it goes like:

1. clean all the parts;
2. put on the appropriate (nord-lock) washer;
3. put some copper grease on the threads;
4. hand-tighten the nuts;
5. get out the torque-wrench;
6. get back into the office to look up the torque requirements (optional step in theory, I always forget what the torque was);
7. torque em-up;
8. mark with nail-polish that it’s done.

(and take some pictures in between all that)

So, what’s left for the rear end?

• I want to replace the straight grease nipples on the Upper Joints with bended ones, as the straight ones seem unreachable, at least with my grease gun;
• need to double check the torque on the big castellated nuts at the end of the drive-shafts keeping the hub in place, 75 Nm seems a bit low;
• the original jag had some protective covers for the drive shafts, should I fit these? They seem a bit flimsy to me;
• mount the whole thing to the chassis obviously.

I think that is about it.

Having both the hubs completed, I wanted to do a quick measurement of rear toe-in (or, let’s hope not, toe-out). So, clamped the laser to both hubs and marked the two projections on the garage-door.

Result: a bit more than 5mm overall toe-in over 4 meters. It’s on the good side of the scale at least! (If it had not been I would not have known how to correct it BTW). The value seems a bit on the low end of the acceptable range, but once the rear-end is in the chassis, I’ll do some more detailed measurements.

Rest of the day was filled with entertaining some friends coming over and a couple of minor jobs, one of which was to paint the upper ball joints as they started to show some rust. We can’t have that, obviously!

Here’s a rundown of the list of stuff I’m waiting for:

• engine mounts
• Tremex TKO 600 gearbox
• propshaft
• complete ss exhaust + headers

The position of the exhaust will be a bit different at the back. Instead of the two exhaust pipes in the centre as is common for GD type cobra’s,

or an option seen lately, at the outside:

Mine will be somewhere in between those two types. I like the wider looks of the exhausts, but not too wide as in the picture above, so mine will be situated between the lights and the vertical chrome thingies.

• omex 710 ECU + wiring

The omex needs a little adjusting (amplification I think it is called) to be able to drive the injectors of the LS2 directly.

• alternator + bracket
• starter motor
• air intake box + filter
• radiator + fan kit
• straight thermostat outlet

The thermostat on the LS2 is normally at an angle, which does not fit in the GD chassis, so a straight version needs to be mounted. (if you look at this picture at flickr you’ll see the notes about the thermostat etc. I’m hoping to get those notes working on this blog directly someday.)

• SS header tank
• several hoses and wiring

Hoses in black, wiring semi-assembled, courtesy of the omex guys.

• fuel pump and filter

I would like to assemble the fuel pump like so:

The above is a euro chassis, not the jag based one I have, so we’ll have to see if there is enough room (esp. with the brake discs inboard).

• mechanical throttle

Apparently the electronic throttle is not allowed, so it needs to be replaced by a mechanical one. Not sure what the precise reason for this is. but my guess would be that it has something to do with paranoia about (aftermarket) ECU’s going berzerk and giving an uncontrollable full open throttle signal, with the imaginable consequences of that (esp. when an automatic gearbox is fitted).

So, lots to do when the stuff gets here.

I should have photographed a measuring tape next to the marks, but it’s way less than an inch, so I guess I’m in the clear.

Apparently my measurements weren’t that bad and I got a bit lucky. Measured endfloat now was 0.055 mm which corresponds to just a bit more than 0.002″. This is just above the minimum. Phew!

So, the all trial assembly to the complete rear end is now complete. What is left is the right-side camber shims (waiting for delivery) and measuring toe-in.

One thing I noticed was that there is some play on the left side of the output-shaft of the diff. That is, i can turn the brake-disc a bit without a corresponding movement of the input shaft. The right side has this as well, but much less. I’ll have to consult a jag expert to assess the limits on this. Mr. Haynes does only talk of excessive crownwheel to pinion backlash as the cause of a problem, but not how much of this backlash is allowed (maximally).

Next, I created a dummy shaft for the outer fulcrum, having a slightly smaller width as the hub. This simplifies assembling the hub to the wishbone considerably and makes sure the shims which are inside the fulcrum stay properly positioned.

The “hub—wishbone fit” was pretty much dead on. There are shims to make sure the hub is centred and to prevent bending the ends of the wishbone. I had bought a set of 8 or so but I could only fit (with considerable effort) one shim of 3 or 8 thou (cant remember). Not sure how critical this is.

Next up was setting up the lower wishbone having a 2″ downward slope over its length; presumably emulating the normal ride-height like that. Fitting shims between the drive-shaft and the brake-disc makes it easy to adjust the camber. The one-tenth of a degree negative camber should do just fine for now. I bet I need to revisit this once the car is completed and the proper ride-height is determined.

The big nut on the drive shaft needs to be torqued up (only to 75Nm apparently, which seems small for such a big boy). Doing that is somewhat awkward on just the hub, on the complete assembly however it is basically just a matter of ‘putting the thing on the handbrake’ and torque up the nut. Also the previously determined endfloat can be checked again now, which I will do tomorrow.

For the 4 inner lock nuts I’ve have fitted some temporary nuts for now; to be replaced with the metal-lock nuts once the whole assembly is attached to the chassis.

So, for the other side, I still need the inner oil seal and a set of shims to be able to complete it. They should arrive this week.

This completes one rear hub. To complete the other one I’m waiting on the (extra thick) spacer and another inner oil seal.

So, out it came again and I’ll have to order a new one. No progress made today

…and greasing up the bearing.

After placing the housing on top of the bearing and filling the cavity with lots of grease, the inner bearing can be driven in, but not completely. Formally, a jaguar specific tool (J15 or something like that) should be used to put pressure on the bearing. This tools contains a machined edge with a specific height (0.152″ I think) which makes sure the bearing is not driven in completely. By leaving a little bit of room a (large) endfloat can be measured and from there the necessary spacer thickness can be calculated. Not having this tool I ordered the thickest spacer (0.148″) for an alternative procedure.

With this spacer on top of the inner bearing the whole hub was put under the press to drive in the bearing. When the spacer is flat with the bearing the endfloat can be measured.

In my case the endfloat was 0.016″ The target endfloat is between 0.002″ and 0.006″, aiming at the average 0.004″. So, instead of the 0.148″ spacer I would need a 0.148″ – 0.012″ = 0.136″ which is exactly the size I took out of the donor part, so I can reuse that one.

This result was expected for one hub only though. One of the hubs had to be replaced because of a crack. It is likely that this hub has different dimensions and another size spacer will be needed. Doing the same procedure for the other hub revealed that the 0.148″ spacer would lead to an endfloat of near zero ?!?

Hmm…

So, I would need a spacer with a minimum thickness of 0.150″ (leading to the minimal endfloat of 0.002″) This spacer used to exist, but apparently not anymore. Need to sleep on this one what to do here.

There are a couple of hurdles to overcome. First, when the thing gets hot gloves are mandatory which makes handling the piece more cumbersome and handling the thrower quickly but steadily over the hub proved to be quite a dexterity challenge.

Next, to much heat will ruin the passivation layer on the zinc, so I do not want to heat them up to the point where that happens.

And third, the heating will expand the part, but we’re talking parts of millimetres here; I figured about .5 mm difference between the cold and heated part. This means we’ll have to make sure the cold part is brought within that range. There’s also not much room for error.

So, first thing was to do a trial run to get some feel for the procedure and the measurements. The cold part inner diameter was about .8mm smaller than the diameter of the edge. Heating did not make it possible to fit the part but clearly showed a difference in size. I had the hub in the freezer overnight which may have helped a bit too, size-wise.

So, the only thing I could think of was putting the ring in a reference position (cold) and marking how far the circumference would go over the edge by pushing sort of in the same manner I would be able to do while handling the hot part. Marking the arc on the ring and then carefully sanding the complete inner diameter of the thrower to enlarge it a little, fitting the piece regularly.

After quite some sanding and trial fitting and two ‘hot sessions’ it dropped on!

You can see the reference mark and some burn traces in the bottom part of the picture. I’m not sure if you can make it out on the picture below, but the hard work paid off. Nice fit I think.

Fitting the seating ring and bearing is easy with a press. There is a little bit of room between the bearing and the seating ring. I’m not sure if that is supposed to be there, but I do not want to push too hard with the press on the bearing.

It costs something like € 70,- to galvanise a box of parts. It does not matter if that box has 2 bits or is cramped full. So, I’ve been gathering things to fill the box with, but kind of struggled to get a reasonably filled box. As I do want to finish the rear end of the suspension soonish, the box was delivered to Galvin to process. It should be back here within 2 or 3 weeks or so.

Not sure how I am going to fit the throwers onto the hub though. There is a small edge on the hubs over which the throwers should be ‘clicked’. Obviously I do not want to damage the throwers so I’ll either need to find a way to equalize the pressure over the circumference or heat it up so it sort of drops over it automatically. The edge seems to be smaller at the bottom than at the top, so heating it seems a plausible way to go.

Once I get them back, I’ll give that a try first.