A bit miffed, a more than a little disappointed.

I reported the missing oil temp gauge to Factory Five via email - you don't get to talk to Factory Five. 

Their service has been quite a disappointment when compared to Van's. 

I finally received an email regarding the gauge. The sent me a Return Authorization form and instructed me to ship back the six gauges and they will (presumably) send me seven in return.

It's a three hour roundtrip to go get them, so its going to be a few days before I can comply.

I did make my feelings known in a reply to their email. It was angry in tone, but my disappointment in their "service" leaves me distinctly unimpressed.

Oh well. We aren't going to need them anytime soon, and FF5 is paying the freight. 

It could be worse.

Update:

After all of that grousing, some of which went into the aforementioned email, I received a phone call from FF5. As it turns out, the reason there were only six gauges rather than the expected seven is that they sent the completely wrong set. I had opted for an upgrade for gauges with internal lights built in - the set they sent were not those. They're sending me a decal that I can put on the box and ship it back a their cost.

I also confirmed that the axle is still being packed for shipping. I only asked about that to ensure that it was in process rather than forgotten. It was NOT cheap!

I apologized for the tone of the email and he apologized for their mistake. All is well.

But Van's is still better. Van's is also selling kits four times more expensive.

Inventory, shuffling the cars

 Things are happening now! That said, we have yet to apply a tool to a piece of Cobra. Inventory, though, has been accomplished. That entailed the opening of a large collection of cardboard boxes of all shapes, sizes, and weight. Ah, but the wonderful prizes that were unearthed!

The point of doing an inventory is obvious. There are literally hundreds of pieces/parts and it is always possible that a few got missed. The quality of the packaging was good - there were no parts obviously bent, twisted, broken, or scratched. The quality of the packaging was so good that it was tempting to just take their word for it that everything was included, but that turned out to be wrong.

We are missing a gauge. It's an important one, too. Oil Temperature. The only one more important is oil pressure, but those two are kissing cousins. Without oil pressure or overly heated oil, the beautiful engine would be ruined. I called Factory Five and left a message reporting the missing gauge. An answering machine took my complaint and as of yet there has been no response. Hopefully the gauge just drops into one of our mailboxes. Also missing is the axle, but FedEx has transmitted their intent to drop something heavy off on Monday - that pretty much has to be the axle.

Speaking of the engine.... I truly believe that it can justifiably called a Work of Art. I just stood there and stared at it for at least 20 minutes. 

I had no idea how large Blue Print Engine factory is. It sure looks like they know what they're doing:

Once the inventory was done, we shifted various cars/chassis around to get the Cobra chassis into the shop. Lifting was involved. My back objected vociferously. Still hurts two days later. The next step is the painting of the chassis. Once that's done, the actual build will begin.

The body has good company out in the barn.

Getting Started

 As it turns out, the build doesn't exactly start out with a bang. In fact, we actually began by removing parts. With an auspicious start like that.... this is gonna take awhile! But we already knew that.

The first thing to do was to remove the doors, which was trivially easy, but in what I hope doesn't become a perennial problem, the lifting and moving of the body was a 3-person job. Now I realize that I'm of an age when I start to forget things, but I'm fairly sure there was just the two of us. Exacerbating the problem of body count was the fact that I am the proverbial 80 pound weakling, albeit a bit overweight as well.

Any body mass I have has about a 3% chance of being muscle. The rest is donuts and pizza.

The first attempt was a bit worrisome - neither of us could budge our side of the body. It was at this point I realized that FF5 doesn't provide every detail. For example, consider that the reason that we couldn't lift the body was not solely the problem of my body. The problem turned out to be that the body had a dozen or so screws attaching it to the chassis. The majority of those screws were cleverly concealed in awkward places, while the remainder were just hard to get at.

We managed to get it done. The manual did mention that The Big Lift would be slightly easier with a 3rd person, but not for the reason I thought (which again had to do with my lack of lifting ability). The 3rd person's job was to pull the sides of the body away from the chassis - the body wraps down around the chassis at the side doors. With just the two of us, we had to kludge up a solution based on other scraps of wood strategically placed in areas that would spread and hold the sides of the body.

With all of those preparation taken care of, we made the lift.

Days later my lower back is still very sore.

The next issue was to keep the body from sagging while it sits in the barn waiting until its time to put it back on, which I suspect is pretty far down the road. That's saying a lot because as mentioned above, we aren't even on the road yet - we're basically backing down the driveway. Figuratively.

The manual provides two methods for supporting the body. The first is some sort of inner skeleton created from a veritable forest of lumber and a fortnight of work, while the 2nd option has an ingredient list of two (2!) 24" long 2x4s. 

Ha ha ha ha!!  Good one, FF5!

I decided on the latter option, mostly because I already had a sacrificial 2x4 in my basement scrap lumber yard. Oh, who am I kidding.... it was the only palatable option. If I wanted to work with lumber I would make a 2nd attempt at building a porch swing. Having learned from the 1st attempt that it pays to buy wood strong enough to actually support humans, it might even have an outside chance of being usable. 

Compared with that, cutting a few feet off of a 2x4 should be within my grasp.

It was.

The next step (or maybe the first - it doesn't matter) was to find the one box (out of 40) that has the interior carpet in it and get the contents out of the box and laid out flat somewhere. Apparently the carpets are rolled up or folded and it takes awhile for them to flatten out. Sadly, the inventory sheets had been left at home so the box we needed to open would be difficult to find.

It can wait. This is not going to be a fast build.

Moving on, we next had to remove all of the aluminum panels that had been tacked into place with the same type of screws that were holding the body onto the chassis. We have quite a puddle of those now, FF5 doesn't mention whether or not we're going to need them again, so I'll put them somewhere where I won't forget. 

Update: they do get used again to hold panels in place while riveting them in.

I swear I could hunt for 20 minutes to find what I'm already holding in my left hand. Odds are that if we do eventually need those screws, we will be buying new ones.

Hopefully that level of forgetfulness doesn't reach the level of trying to remember where I stored the engine.

FF5 insisted that we mark each panel with its location and outline with regards to the chassis. We decided against doing so. Well, Grant insisted. To be fair, they are all distinctly shaped and it should be easy to get them back to their homes. If not, there's a diagram in the build manual. That, and the fact that I was in favoring of marking them, he will have to figure it out by himself. 

Which he will do in about 90 seconds, natch.

It never pays to bet against him when it comes to cars.

The chassis is not yet in the shop so we can't do much more for now. The next step in the manual is the building up of the shock absorbers, followed by putting together the front A-arms. Or the A-arms before the shock absorbers. The order doesn't matter. I did need to buy another tool, though. Assembling the shock, uh, assemblies requires the use of Circlip pliers. In the past I have dealt with Circlips by prying them out with a screwdriver, but that was in a far less critical situation: my airplane. Amazon delivered the new pliers the next day.

That's it for now. A few more logistical challenges to go before we can really start putting it all together.

So far, so good!