Regular visitors will have probably noticed that it has been awhile since I have updated this journal - this was due to the inevitable time in every large project where you're just sick and tired of it. Having said that, I haven't worked on any kind of significant effort since 1) the day I retired seven years ago, and 2) I built an airplane. Either or both of those managed to slap me down pretty hard at times. The Cobra Doldrums were nowhere near as disruptive as the previous examples, but there was a definite lack of go get'em in the air.
Which, by the way, my airplane has not. Get in the air, that is. When I get into a don't care kind of fugue, it affects pretty much everything.
That said, a notable pass time these days is drawing pictures for the Grandboyz. I have never been very artistic (and I am still not) but I found a way to cheat. I google "drawing outline {airplanes/cars/construction equipment - pick one}"
It's just like when I drew in coloring books as a child, with the only difference being that I stay inside the lines a little bit better. I usually use colored pencils, but now and then I'll try acrylic paint or felt-tip markers.
It's just like when I drew in coloring books as a child, with the only difference being that I stay inside the lines a little bit better.
So, what happened with the mopey mood was shared by Grant. He did a fantastic job of getting the aluminum panels around the tunnel by which I mean he completely removed the sloppy job that I did drilling and riveting those panels. F5 must be almost spookily prescient - they knew exactly which parts to double-ship back during the difficult period when they were packing our kit.
There was a time in my life when I would have been insulted by him having re-done my mess, but I grew out of that about six months ago. Now if I wanted to be petty I would point out that a simple google search on the word 'perfectionism' gave me a nice little list of other words:
Quotes About Perfectionism
Better to do something imperfectly than to do nothing flawlessly. ...
Use what talent you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best.
Aim for success, not perfection.
Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.
So, yeah, none of that really matters - the stick is finished and I'm one more step closer to trying to harness 400 hp.
I strongly suspect that he did all of the work on the shifter to avoid working on the wiring. It's convenient to have a wiring harness provided, but the harness has a lot of redundancy/duplication in there, probably so that it can be used across most (in not all) of the F5 models. Personally, I would be fine with all of that if it was better documented.
Oh, just in case you missed it, I am now also not all that thrilled with the Build Manual. Just one more way that I have been spoiled by Vans Aircraft's documentation.
Moving on, this is what the dashboard will look like installed.
It's starting to look like the body will be lifted into place soon.
I got out for a work session a couple of days ago, and I was proven to be correct that the body work needs to start. While Grant was (STILL!!) trying to get a handle on the wiring, he tasked me to sand the interior of the shell. Why? Because if we don't, the red will be visible from a number of spots when the car is finished.
This took about three hours, even with the use of the air sander. The sanding discs cost just about 50¢ each and last for approximately 6.386 seconds before they're worn out. The primary task was to ensure that there were no loose fiberglass strings floating loose where they would get painted and thus hardened.
That was all I had time for, and my back was acting up from all of the kneeling and squatting, so I headed home. We're getting very close to lifting the body and setting it on chassis for the first time - I'm wondering if just the two of us can do that.
I have been programming computers since 1977. It all started in high school - the Cincinnati Public Schools had a mainframe computer for whatever reason, but one of the nice things about it was that they would let a small number of students use it during lunch break. It was a 300 baud (slower than frozen molasses) modem and a teletype "display."
We primarily played a very, VERY rudimentary computer game based very, VERY loosely on Star Trek. This is what it looked like, albeit printed on paper and egregiously slow. It was a tremendous waste of paper in retrospect... but it was absolutely intriguing.
I eventually got bored with the game, but I was fascinated with coding. It was BASIC back then, but that was a huge leap from machine or assembly programming.
Machine language is the binary code computers understand and execute directly, while assembly language is a human-readable machine language representation. One of the key differences between the two languages is their level of abstraction.
They both sucked. BASIC was the next step up. It was far more accessible and learnable.
Then along came the Radio Shack TRS-80.
Wikipedia: The TRS-80 Micro Computer System is a desktop microcomputer launched in 1977 and sold by Tandy Corporation through their Radio Shack stores. The name is an abbreviation of Tandy Radio Shack, Z80 [microprocessor]. It is one of the earliest mass-produced and mass-marketed retail home computers.
It cost me about $600 back then. That's about $3,000 in today's dollars. So now you're starting to wonder where a 16 year old got that kind of scratch at such a young age, right? My secret was a will to work for money. That statement probably made you wonder where that money came from.
Remember this? “They Make Money The Old-Fashioned Way, They Earn It.” - John Houseman.
So did I. When I was in the 5th grade, school lunch cost a princely 35¢. Very early in the school year we were offered the opportunity to work in the lunchroom in exchange for free lunch. Even back then there was no such thing as a free lunch - the cost to me was leaving the pre-lunch class 15 minutes early and getting to the post-prandial 15 minutes late. Not much of burden, that. The opposite, in fact.
On the plus side, my mom decided that she would start a little in-house bank account and contribute $1.75 per week (five 35¢ lunches) - it doesn't sound like much now, but as a five year old it was like being Scrooge McDuck.
I never spent a dime of it.
As I got older, I tried some of the more common jobs such as delivering the local "free" newspaper (quit that when I was flattened by a very growling German Shephard, a breed that I still dislike to this very day), but my first real job was when I was in Jr. High School. I got a job working for an independent pharmacy - I worked the cash register and made local deliveries. I wasn't old enough to drive yet, so I could only work in the nearby area. Which, to be fair, was a sh!thole. I was accosted a number of times while delivering. Once I was old enough to drive, I learned that I had had a pretty good gig.
The car was a total piece of crap beat-up, ragged-out, Chevy Nova. It was no accident that the word "Nova" means "Does not go" in Spanish. The tires were bare, having apparently been manufactured in 1929. I ended up with a flat tire. No problem, right? Surely I knew how to change a tire by then right?
Yep. But... the jack was nothing but a puddle of rust. It wouldn't have mattered, though, because the spare was flat.
I got reamed when I got back to the pharmacy. I was mighty miffed at the time - I had gone back to the most recent delivery, thinking that maybe I could call for help. The only assistance I received was a forthright "Go the F*CK away!!"
I was stuck. We didn't have cell phones back then. So I drove the car back as-was. What was I supposed to do??
I took Phil out to the car and asked him what he would have done. To his credit, he was very apologetic.
I was done soon after anyway - high school was next. I found a new job. I got a job cooking pizza. I worked the legal limit for a minor: 30 hours a week. That left no time for extracurriculars, but it sure did fill up my bank account!
And that is how I ended up with a 30+ year career as a software developer. It was a lucrative field of work, but it came with a cost that I had not anticipated. If you own a pickup truck, it is quite likely that you are asked to move, carry, haul any number of things for friends, neighbors, and the guy standing behind you at the Walmart checkout.
It's the same with computers.
You can probably imagine the demands on a pickup-owner/computer-knowledgeable kind of guy.
These days the computer stuff is pretty much limited to family. I don't mind it at all, but the problem is that I have been retired 6-7 years ago and I am starting to forget all of that stuff.
Yesterday I drove out to Dad's place to try to improve the quality-of-PC-life for myself. He has difficulty getting decent internet service out there in the country. His house is pretty far away from the road, the wiring required to get a wired connection is prohibitively costly, satellite was an option, but expensive and flaky, and the wiring in the house is also suspect. The best thing I could come up with was a mobile hot spot.
That solution was kludgy - the Hot Spot was a Verizon tablet. It worked, but it was complicated. He was also running out of his monthly fast internet right around the 3rd week of the month. We went back to Verizon and got his data plan upgraded and also got a much better hot spot.
That problem more or less fixed, I headed to the shop to do some work on the car. Unfortunately, there wasn't much I could help with. Grant has (thankfully) started working on the car without me being there. He's still working on the wiring, a job that has turned out to be far more effort than expected. As with nearly all of the build, the manual is pretty much useless.
Oddly enough, that is nowhere near the top beef I have with the F5. Sloppy packing, some parts missing, others duplicated two or three times (which actually came in handy when I clumsily mis-drilled the tunnel cover) - it is nowhere near the quality experience I had/have with Vans Aircraft.
I was spoiled before we even started.
Once the tunnel cover situation was rectified, Grant got back to wiring. The harness is more or less installed and ready to be hooked up to a dozen or so lights, switches, etc. Most everything has a ground wire...
So, not a whole lot of progress on the car, but still time well spent.
Work time for this step: 3 hours.
Unproductive time: None. Utilizing flagging skills is good.
It sounded like a good idea. Best intentions and all that. I mean, we have a very nice travel trailer and one of the places we like to go with it is Greenville. More specifically, the Darke Co. Fairgrounds. It's nice and quiet for 50 weeks out of the year, but it costs $35 a night. Given that we are usually only there to spend time with my dad and brother, though, there is no hard and fast rule that says we have to stay there. There are benefits to it (primarily easy access to food) but...
We discovered that we can just as easily right on Grant's property. It's not as quiet, being right on the side of US 36, but we got used to that pretty quickly. So, being right there next to the shop we would certainly get a lot done on the Cobra.
Nope. There are also distractions. The worst of which was picking up walnuts on Dad's driveway to avoid the mess and risk of a twisted ankle. I spent a bit of time picking the damned things up, but they were still falling off of the tree pretty regularly. The element of risk sweetened the task, but the inability to keep up with the pace of falling nuts took any scintilla of fun out of the job.
I quit.
The other distraction was walking. I love walking the perimeter of the two contiguous farms with my dog Cassie. Cassie has a history with this particular horse.
Cassie has no fear, and she seems to have an affinity for horses. She decided one day that she would enjoy running around with Dublo Six:
This is also the horse that bit me. I was in the habit of giving him treats (apples, corn, etc.) and one day he deliberately took a pretty bite out of the bottom of my palm. I gotta say, it hurt quite bit. That was also the last day I visited with him. Nowadays he follows Cassie and me as we walk around his pasture. This might be an unspoken apology from the horse, but I'm not keen on testing that.
One of the jobs tasked to be on the car was to finish up drilling and riveting the top tunnel cover. Right up my alley, right? I build an airplane that way and it still flies, so it seemed to be safe ground.
It was not.
I got quite a scolding for that. I had to disappear for awhile. Fortunately I had a chore to do: go get a can of yellow spray paint and a couple of cap head bolts. Off to Ace Hardware in Greenville - a good enough distance to cool off. The yellow paint was deemed to be correctly selected, but the bolts were wrong. The weren't cap head bolts, apparently, despite my having asked the Ace guy for a couple of cap head bolts.
Apparently there is more than one type of "cap head," or I was waited upon by a new or just stupid employee.
I'm going with inexperienced.
And yes, I was on the receiving end of more disdain. To be fair, I'm surprised it took this long.
The yellow paint was for the drivers-side seat. I have been monitoring F5 builds on the internet and someone pointed out this adjustable seat rail system. I figured that would be nice to have. What I didn't consider was that it might be a pain to install.
Lot's of grumbling about that.
Lupus flat don't care.
To be fair, this seat mechanism is pretty simple in concept, but that parts did not fit especially well. That "hoop" bar is for adjusting the seat position. It was not bent properly at the factory, though. It did not fit well at all.
It doesn't take much to get Grant to start chopping stuff up. The seat handle never had a chance.
That didn't work well at all, so an entirely new process was cooked up. Welding must be fun because there sure is a hella lot of it going on. As an aside, I am desperate to learn how to weld. I'm not sure how to go about it, but I'm going to find a way eventually
This is the new handle. It now looks more like the handle for an ejection seat. I like it very much! I might add some black stripes to make it look more authentic.
It's getting to a point in the build where there isn't much for me to do. F5 included these little ID plates with the kit. I don't intend to put them on the side of the car, but I thought maybe this would be a nice place to use one:
Hard veto on that idea.
The wiring is still in-work. We (not me) managed to let a wire ground to the car, which immediately burned up a 15 amp fuse. Two minutes later, it happened again.
"Good thing I have 10 of those," he said.
One minute later: "ZAP" went fuse number two.
I took a potty break. I am fascinated (and quite envious) of his TP holder.
By the end of our four-day visit, we got a couple of productive days and a couple of "just being on the farm(s)" days. We got back just in time to see the grandboys dressed up in their Halloween costumes.
I have a very full and satisfying life.
Work time for this step: 10 hours.
Unproductive time: None. Relaxation and visiting family is not unproductive at all
If it seems like quite awhile since we have worked on the car, well... that's because I missed a week. The three hour round trip (and the cost of gas) isn't viable unless I can stay at least 5-6 hours. That means that even a half hour commitment at home negates any possibility of doing some work on the Cobra. There are things that Grant can do without me being there (example: I was on site for the installation of a brake caliper - if you've seen one, you've seen them all. More or less, anyway.
This week has been a bit more open. So far.
The plan for the day in this case sounded pretty easy: install the horn(s). Now, I do not know how many (if any) horns were included in the kit, but I do know that he had no less than six horns on hand. That is obviously (one would think) far more than enough to meet my needs. Fortunately, his Roadster also needs horn functionality, so the Cobra would only receive three of them.
That is still quite cacophonous. Trust me on this - I was "treated" to an extremely loud demonstration.
The trick for installing three horns is to 1) find an open enough piece of real estate under the hood, and 2) a fixture to mount them to.
Oh, there was also a bit of a leak in the clutch hydraulics to be fixed. Lupus lent a hand. Urr... paw.
He can be quite helpful, but he spends most of his shop time laying claim to a future seat in the car.
Back to the horns. Grant had no less than six of them on hand. I don't know how many (if any at all) horns were included with the kit, so it was decided to portion them out: three for his Roadster and three for the Cobra. All three were tested one at a time and all three at once.
They are louder than the air horns on a Mack truck. Made my ears ring. So... perfect!!
Not surprisingly, F5 did not foresee the need for room three horns, nor did they provide a mounting bracket. Fortunately for me, Grant is a Master Fabricator. He cut out three short lengths of metal plate.
I then drilled 1/4" mounting holes in each plate.
Each plate was then shaped into a nice looking yet quite functional mounting rack.
There wasn't much for me to do, so I spent some time trying to teach Lupus to stay off of my seats.
He laughed it off. He's a best friend of the owner of the shop, so I was forced to take any abuse dished out by Prince Lupus. He actually laughs in my face!!
He's far too cute for my own good.
This is the foundation of the three-horn mount.
This is just before the 3rd mount was welded on:
Sadly (but beneficially) enough, I don't typically get to do the fun stuff (anything that includes sparks) such as welding. Instead of moping around, I got to wondering how precise the hole locations (I paid F5 an extra $149 to do it, thinking they would be very good at it - long before we received the kit and found out that precision is in the eye of the cutter) so I grabbed one of the rollover hoops to test the fit.
About what I have come to expect.
That isn't very close at all. There wasn't a $199 version of the cutting, so I guess this is as good as it gets. Hopefully it will work out okay.
Work time for this step: 5 hours.
Unproductive time: 1 hour of fighting Lupus for a place to sit.
Frustration Level: 3/10 for car, 6/10 with Lupus.
Total time of build: 127 hours.
Wednesday, October 4, 2023
Having worked our way past the distractions of last week, we moved forward into a week of obstructions.
It's hard to say whether this is an improvement, or another incremental push towards the cliff called F*ck It All. (Pardon my faux French)
That having been said, it is always uplifting just to be out on the farm(s).
Grant has been working on the engine. I was running just fine, right up until it wasn't. Kicking on the power at the ignition switch lights up all of the overly complicated Sniper EFI fuel injection components and also lights up the fuel pump - it's fairly loud, so we were sure the fuel pump was working, but the engine would only run for a few seconds before dying.
This was an unwelcome event, as well as being somewhat perplexing because it had been running just fine before.
Like a wise man once told me, it is prudent to avoid blondes and carburetors. Or maybe I just learned that all by myself. Memory is hazy on that. Anyway, frustration was the Word of the Day.
All symptoms pointed to a fuel delivery problem. Taking a rear-to-front strategy to find and attack the gremlin(s), we verified that the in-tank fuel pump was working, there were no copious leaks/geysers of fuel, and fuel was being received by the fuel pressure regulator. Unfortunately, I had chosen to mount the regulator with rivets.
That was pretty dumb, to be honest.
I'm really just here for comedic effect.
Oh well, it was just two rivets.
Caption: "Hmmmmmmmmm."
I was internally scoffing at the idea that he could find a mechanical problem on such a simple component, but sure enough he proved me wrong.
Again.
Take a close look at the hole in the middle of the component. Can you see the obstruction?
Here's a better view:
While it was nice to have found the problem, it was still very frustrating and disappointing. Frustrating because, well, that's obvious, but it's also a big disappointment to find this kind of sloppiness from Blueprint Engines. Grant is already a bit miffed at me already because he would have much preferred a simple carburetor over the incomprehensible SniperEFI.
That was water under the bridge, though, so we gave it another try.
Same result. 😈😡
Here is some good news, though: there was another obstruction. I found this one halfway down in one of the fuel lines:
Work time for this step: 2 hours.
Unproductive time: 2 hours of bonding with Lupus and trap shooting.
