Building a GD427 Cobra Replica

The amount of dirty parts is shrinking considerably now. Especially after blasting the parts that are ‘ready for painting’ look amazing.

It makes the parts almost look like there is a paint finish on them.

I also got my hands on a broken bench drill. It’s a new machine but the motor does not start well. Bit of a gamble, but it sounds like the startup capacitor is either the wrong size or broken. It’s too big for my multimeter so i can not be sure if it is Ok or not.

Opening up the motor itself revealed a loose wire?!? Seconds before the motor ran smooth, so i must have torn it loose on opening up the motor. Other than that, the motor looked fine. I also noticed the motor got quite hot when trying to get it to run, but i’m hoping that is the abnormal load on the secondary coil during the testing. If I can get this fixed by a capacitor replacement, i got a really good deal! If not, i got a lousy one.

I have been looking to buy a new welding machine for a while. Initially i had my mind set on a TIG machine, or one which could do both MIG and TIG. The lure of the very nice TIG welds got to me i guess.

A short talk with the guy at the excellent Rustbuster shop quickly convinced me that MIG was the better option for my skill level; beginner, not to mention my wallet. A good TIG machine costs the world. After trying a few welds in their training room I went for the Cebora Bravo 155 machine. This was one of the rare occasions where i spent less money than originally envisioned. I am going to attend some welding course when time permits.

I am not sure what happened exactly but last week the power went out and I could not get it back on. The earth leakage circuit breaker activated and kept doing that when reset. It turned out the compressor was the cause. Unplugging it allowed the power to come back on. This weekend I had the time to figure out what had happened. Opening up the case and looking inside did not give much hope:

While the cracked housing is bad, that didn’t explain the earth leakage. Opening up the motor itself did though:

That’s fried! I’m hesitant to just put another motor back in. I’m thinking of turning the whole compressor in and getting one back with a little more grunt and running on 3 phase current

Ok, got a new tool which burned another hole in the wallet. Blind rivets are the things which come pre-installed for the chassis plate and the pre-drilled positions for the T-pieces in the brake-lines.

It’s not trivial to make a good rivet I found out. The first thing you have to get right is the amount of shrinkage you want to introduce in the rivet. Too little and the rivet is loose, too much and it deforms too much.

The next thing to be aware of (at least in the aluminium rivets I bought for practice) is the speed at which you ‘rivet’. Slow is the thing, apparently. If you go to fast the threads will be ruined. I’m waiting for delivery of the steel rivets to be used for attaching the brake-lines to the chassis.