Shelsley Walsh Members Day 2020

We are members of the Midlands Automobile Club based at the Shelsley Walsh hillclimb venue and recently had the chance to enter a Members day event. This is an all-day affair and was open to 100 cars, all getting the chance of doing 6 runs up the hill.
I've done this previously in our S2000 but this time the missus agreed to let me take the Cobra provided she came too!.

I started out as usual with the hillclimb thinking I'll just take it easy and cruise up the hill, but get on the startline, lights change to green and you just have to go for it!

The video below is one of our gentler runs up the hill  - sorry for the quality.

Pleasingly, the car performed really well on the day, never missed a beat and survived the hardest outing she's had thus far.

Once I've got better used to the handling I'd love to give it another go. Shelsley is quite narrow and if the back steps out its a trip to the menders!

2020 Update

Here we are in May and Cobra has been SORN'd all year with the CoronaVirus situation. The lock-down did at least mean I could get on with some fettling jobs and a couple of major items that I'd put off.

1st one was fitting the Tonneau cover I bought as a kit from AK last year. Most folks get AK to fit these at the factory, but talking it through with Jon he convinced me it was a straightforward customer fit.

The kit contains the cover itself plus the body pins and fasteners.

The cover does not come with the fasteners fitted so these have to be fitted as part of the job.

The body pins supplied are not the self tapper type as Jon reckons these can cause the paint to crack, thus the ones supplied require drill through body and fixing with a nut.

I started by working out where to fit the rearmost, central pin then working from there. Once this was in place, I fitted the appropriate fastener to the cover and attached to the body pin. From there I worked out the front pin positions (replacing the demister screws), fitted the cover fasteners so the cover was fitted front/back on the centreline.  The trick is to maintain tension in the cover while positioning the remaining pins and the result is a taught canvas when fully fitted.

Next job - Sump Guard

I bought this off Charlie Freeman over a year ago and finally got round to fitting it.

Easy job to do with my lift.

And finally, I decided to check my tracking.

Since I refitted the diff which had required complete dismantle of rear suspension - I was getting a fair bit of tyre squeal at lowish cornering speeds.

In the absence of any technical equipment I used the good old string and tape measure method.

First off was to check the rear wheel alignment. According to the forums, the rear wheels should be either parallel or up to 1mm toe-in. ( i.e. difference between track at front and rear of the wheel rim between each side.)

I made a perfectly square frame using some aluminium I section I had around and used this to create a box around the back of the car , just enough to wrap around the rear wheels. Using a measure and a bit of maths, its then easy to calculate if the wheel rims are parallel. It turned out mine were miles out, toe in was a lot more than 1mm.

As it happens, my rear lower A- Arms are the type that have slotted fulcrum holes at the outer end. These allow you to adjust the camber and toe-in. The A-Arm has a shoulder each side of the slotted hole that allows an eccentric headed bolt to be used to adjust the movement in-out. I didn't have one of these bolts so made an eccentric washer that does the same job. Using this I managed to set the rear wheels as near as dammit parallel, maybe just a touch of toe-in.

On to the front, I set up string lines between axle stands on each side of the car, taking a measure from the rear wheel rims. As the rears were now parallel, its reasonable to assume that the strings are parallel over their full length. I then took measurements from the strings to the front and rear of each front wheel rim and calculated that I had about 12mm to-in. The AK manual states 4mm so clearly some adjustment required.  I made the adjustments equally on both track rod ends to make sure the steering wheel stayed central and managed to get to 4mm toe-in.

Road test  - and what a difference! No tyre squeal and a lot more confidence around corners. Just goes to show how important having decent alignment is.

Diff refurb

As mentioned previously the diff was feeling a bit loose and getting some clonking noises on overrun so decided it was time to get this sorted.

Problem number 1 is getting the thing out of the car as a) its 50 lbs in weight and b) there is a fair bit to dismantle to extract it.

Fortunately my new lift has made life a lot simpler.

So, rear wheels off,
Fuel tank drained and removed,
Diff Oil drained.
Handbrake cables unclipped
Coilovers unbolted from lower arms
Lower suspension a frame removed.
Drive shafts removed,
Propshaft unbolted from pinion.
Rear suspension carrier and tie rods removed from Diff.

At this point I'm thinking about how to unbolt and lower the diff without injuring myself so came up with an idea to build a jacking system to catch the diff when unbolted.
I made this out of timber and its essentially a lifting bed that I can raise and lower using a trolley jack.
This worked a treat and I could safely extract and lower the diff to drag it from under the car single handed.

Problem number 2 is getting it refurbished.
I spoke to Simply Performance as recommended by Jon at AK and arranged to take it to their place in Dorking. They did a full rebuild service - its not cheap but I'm hoping it will do the job.
All new bearings and washers, a new carrier (cross pin had made the holes in the diff carrier oval (hence a lot of play), all set up and painted.

Problem number 3 is getting it back in the car.
My lift bed was really handy in positioning the diff and sliding it back into place single handed. Then simply  a case of bolting all the suspension, drive shafts, brakes etc back into place. For the re-assembly it took me about an elapsed day.

Fuel tank sender
The old fuel tank sender had never worked properly so I invested in a VDO dip-tube unit.
This caused a challenge in that the tank is drilled for a 6 hole sender mounting at 60mm PCD wheras the new VDO requires 5 holes at 54mm PCD. There was just enough room to drill new holes on the tank to suit the new sender and great news - I now have a working fuel gauge!

Road test - its actually a different car with the refurbed diff. The clonking noise on overrun has gone and driving pleasure improved significantly.

Scissor lift

Finally got round to purchasing a mid rise lift for the garage. And why didn’t I do this years ago instead of struggling with axle stands!

Purchased this handy gadget from Equipment4garages.  This is a single phase unit so ok for my standard mains supply however I had to get a commando socket and plug fitted and update the garage circuit breakers to 20A ‘C’ curve. The breaker is required to allow for surge current when the hydraulic motor starts. Standard breaker would pop.

The lift arrived on an oversize pallet and the fork lift truck driver just managed to push it into the garage on the end of his forks.
There was a small amount of assembly required, hydraulic hoses connections and you have to source some hydraulic oil. The lift comes with some castors which gives some manoeuvrability in the garage as a one person job.

Really chuffed with it and will make those essential maintenance tasks a lot easier.

Shelsley Walsh Breakfast Club

Lovely morning out at Shelsley Walsh for the breakfast club meeting. A gathering of like minded petrol heads, with a nice breakfast and bit of exercise walking it off up the hill.
Love the photo from behind, really shows how the paint colour pops out in sunlight.

Rounding the Circle

So 5 years ago we visited the national Kit car Show at Stoneleigh when we were doing research on which kit to go with and this year the guys at AK asked to borrow Redmist for their stand!.

Pride immediately followed by panic! particularly as AK had not physically seen the car other than in photo's and I started to worry that our car would not meet the exceptionally high standards of the cars usually on display.

This spurred on a few outstanding jobs, i.e. finishing the boot carpeting and three minor paint repairs from the assembly process.

The paint repairs were entrusted once again to Option 1 and Frank managed to turn these round in a day and to a good standard.

A good clean and polish and then off to the show.

Wendi from AK was quite keen to have Redmist it turns out due to the options we had selected, i.e. we were the only car on the stand with a 'proper' engine ( i.e. carbed) ( no offence to LS3 lovers!) plus the bonnet vents and overriders.

The trip to the show was actually the longest she's done at 50 miles each way and first on motorway.
She ran straight as an arrow and cruised fine at 70 ish - albeit quite deaf when arrived!.

In the event Redmist didn't disgrace herself and looked fantastic on display.

Running in

Typically the weather broke just after I got the registration through but every opportunity was taken to get out on an evening with ever increasing local trips just to build up confidence.

I've now realised that building a cobra replica is a journey and definitely not a destination.

On one of my longer trips, I had steam entering the cockpit - opened the bonnet to find that the Radiator cap had pinged off and the water was boiling out. Fortunately spotted before it ran dry.

To date the longest trip has been 80 miles and I've absolutely loved it. The noise is epic and it really attracts attention - I'm told - I wouldn't know as I'm concentrating so much on keeping the thing on the road and avoiding pot holes!. This is not a relaxed drive as there's so much going on but that's the point of these cars. The seats are really comfy though and now I've fitted the wind wings - they do help.

I've done loads of test drives with friends and family many of whom have helped in one way or another even if only encouragement. A special one was with my dads best pal Bob who has maintained a interest in the project, sort of taking over from when Dad passed.

So I'm developing a list of issues - or as my missus says - opportunities to improve!

My fuel gauge isn't working  - I suspect the sender has failed so I'm planing to swap it for a dip tube type. I've checked the fuel consumption and it worked out to be 16.8mpg which was better than hoped for. So cruising should get us 200 miles.

The suspension needs adjustment, I think its marginally too soft, and the car bounces if hist a pot hole or drain cover. The good news is there's plenty of adjustment so next year will be some trial and error to get this right.

My biggest issue is with the rear end which is clonking a bit when on/off power. Its all pointing to the diff which I didn't recondition, so over the winter I'm planning to remove this and have it professionally sorted.

Oil leaks from the engine. There's a reasonable drip from the bottom of the bell housing. It could be the dreaded rear main seal but on further investigation and advice from Brian at Roadcraft it looks like it could be left hand rocker cover - definitely oil on the fear face of the head. This should be an easy fix and we will see where that leads.

Other things to do include completing the carpeting in the boot, fitting the fire extinguisher, fitting the sump guard and getting some weather gear fitted by AK.

So plenty to do next year!