Building a GD427 Cobra Replica

“It’s been 117 days since my last confession…”

So, perhaps a little status update is in order. Although I declared the garaged finished earlier, there’s always something that needs to be finished/improved. So, this summer we place 2 new windows in the south wall.

Although not a very big job, it always takes more time than originally planned. And yet again, I forgot to take a picture of the finished project!

Blogging wise, time was spent migrating from Blogger.com to a local WordPress installation. This allows me to use all the server stuff I already have in place in the office anyway and gives me a bit more control over the blog. I also got fed up with google analytics slowing the blog down even further than I do myself with all the pictures.

WordPress also gives me a couple of extra options which would be harder to do at blogger:

• iphone specific theme;
• support for pages and posts within my ecto blogging client;
• support for both categories and tags;
• more flexible uploads which I’ll need shortly.

I have tried to keep all URLs the same where possible. All feeds and links should still work as they did on Blogger. I had to sacrifice the ‘Followers’ widget and the ‘Profile details’ which are Blogger specific items. There’s some work left to cater for Internet Explorer users (although they should use a better browser anyway).

Work on the cobra has been a bit slow, partly due to the above. All donor parts are basically done and waiting for me to put them on to the chassis. For the front-end I assemble the uprights, at first a bit baffled why the ball joints did not fit.

Fitting the GD lower wishbone bracket to the wishbone seemed like a nice quick job. I layed out everything needed, took the obligatory picture …

and did a trial fit, only to find out the bracket would not fit. (both of them in fact). In the end I had to put the wishbones under the press and squeeze it a bit to be able to get the bolts in. Let’s call it an ‘engineering fit‘.

I probably should have painted the other holes which are not used; I did not realise it at the time.

Here’s also a detail of the Nord-Lock washers I’m using. As a rule of thumb I’m adding around 20% to the specified torque numbers in the jaguar manual. With the nordlock-washers that should lead to about the same bolt tension.