Building a GD427 Cobra Replica

Couple of things which were annoying me fixed today. The reading list on the blog I have deleted. It made the whole thing slow.

While I was at it, I replaced blogger’s commenting system with the intense debate commenting system. This allows commenting without popping up a new window or reloading the whole thing, plus it allows me to respond to those who take the effort to comment, something which was kinda not possible from within blogger. Let me know what you think!

To make this post also about the cobra build, here’s a picture of a Nord-Lock locking washer:

In relevant places, like the brake callipers, I’ll use these washers in addition to the lock wire. I’m not a big fan of loctite. Lock-wire, as such, looks nice but I’m not convinced it is really up to the job of locking bolts. I do appreciate the beauty of it and its usefulness in keeping parts from flying around if something breaks (or should that be: ‘when something breaks’?) Nordlock has a convincing explanation on how the washers work on their website. One of their customers is Donkervoort and I like their cars a lot!

The new bearing cups arrived today too, pressing them in was a quick job. I got them for free, so good service on the part of Kolvenbach Jaguar there.

Reading it first in Simon’s post, there is a development in legislation going on which is rather worrying for all kitcar builders.

The UK has a system to allow people to build their cars and drive them on the public road. The Single Vehicle Approval is key to this system and issues the approval to the owner to legally use the self built car on the roads. The Association of Car Enthusiasts has been tracking the legislation related to modified cars and kitcars since 2004. Their latest news is about the ‘Loss of the SVA test`. The SVA is an important, if not the most important, component in this legislation and the prospect of it changing affects everyone modifying a car or building one.

The only ‘fact’ i can distil at this moment is that the SVA will be replaced by the IVA (where ‘I’ is for Individual). What this IVA is exactly and what the differences are with the current SVA is, as of yet, unclear to me.

Needless to say this potentially has a major impact on kitcar builders. The cars are usually a major expense for people and often worked on for many years before they are allowed on the road. The prospect of not being able to put the Cobra on the road after having worked on it for a long time is sickening.

Building your own car has a certain lure to it. Not only the car enthusiast, but almost everyone without exception, when told about my plans, reacted with something similar to ‘cool!’

What?
So, what are these plans? In short, building me one of these:

What you see there is an AC Cobra Replica, Gardner Douglas style. This car is a replica of a 60′s sports car originally manufactured by the British ‘AC Cars’ , but made famous when Carroll Shelby got his hands on it to combine it with an American V8 Engine.
The first phase to building a car apparently is to spend countless hours browsing the internet to get a grip on costs, supplier info and the differences of all the offerings. Especially in the beginning of this process, it is easy to lose whole weekends just doing that.
Two things stood out in this search process as being more important than any supplier info:

1. talking to people who have already built one;
2. reading the excellent build logs of other people who are building.

So, part of the plan is to document it, inspired by Simon’s excellent blog I linked to above. The journal will be mostly for myself, but if it can please others like Simon’s site helped me, that will be very good.

Why?
I am not one of those car builders having a long outstanding wish to build a Cobra kit car, although the thought has been on my mind on and off for a couple of years. I am the owner of a small software company and my daily work mostly consists of sitting behind a computer screen, either communicating or programming. While I love the job, it lacks a component which makes my body ache, dirty and smell bad; this project will fill those gaps nicely.
Another part is just the curiosity if I can do this. It is a project of reasonable complexity with a certain element of (financial) risk attached to it. I guess if I just wanted to have a nice car, buying one far outsmarts building one.
Luckily there’s no real obligation to be rational on all of this, since many elements of it are not. Having fun just doing it is enough.

How?
We are in the fortunate situation to be living in a rural area where our home and my office are combined. Behind these is a reasonably big garage. It isn’t in a very good shape, in terms of weather protection, so part of the project is to rebuild part of the garage, making it suitable to build the car. Part of the journal will be filled with the activity on rebuilding the garage.

Anyways, enjoy!

marcel