Factory Five Roadster Heads Off For Paint

Our FFR Roadster project is loaded onto a Reliable Carriers car transporter for the trip north to DVS Restorations and KR Performance & Restorations.

It's been just over a year into our Factory Five Cobra replica project, and we must say this build has been one of the most fun projects we've done in a while. A year might sound like a long time, especially when you see an update story just about every month, but when you consider that some classic-Ford projects can take several years to finish, ours has actually been on the fast track since day one. Sure, we've had our parts delays, personal-time conflicts (who wouldn't rather work on their car than cut the lawn or spend a weekend with the in-laws?), but our project build has come along quite nicely.

Something new we've done with this build has been an online diary of the project. Nothing fancy, just a simple weekly update with a few photos. It has been well received, and it's also a great way to sneak a peek at what will be in an upcoming issue.

We've taken our Cobra replica as far as we can in our home garage. Now we know some of our readers have dabbled in body and paintwork, and we keep telling ourselves we need to learn more of this fine art, but we'd rather not do so on what is arguably one of the toughest bodies to finish-sand and prep. When bodyworking a steel (or mostly steel) body, it's much harder to make a mistake, whereas with a fiberglass body, a few too many seconds with a machine sander and you'll have to build the fiberglass back up again. With a steel body, the hood and door gaps are nothing more than a few adjustments, but with the Roadster body, the doors, hood, and trunk lid are all manufactured oversize and have to be sanded down by hand to the proper 31/416-inch gap. We'll be honest; all that scares us, so we'll let the pros at KR Performance & Restorations take over for this part, and then we'll finish the project after the paint is done.

Even though the wiring has been done for a while, we recently decided to add self-canceling turn signals to our project car. Luckily, we hadn't reinstalled the dash assembly. This great little kit from Russ Thompson [rtcobra@comcast.net; (510) 234-7376] comes in two main sections: the column tube and the turn-signal switch assembly. Here, the column tube has been installed over the steering shaft.	Here's the turn-signal assembly itself. The wiring from the switch was terminated with a four-terminal wiring connector for easy installation and servicing.	The column tube requires a larger dash opening for the assembly to pass through. After trimming the opening to size, we finished off the dash opening with a trim bezel from Mike's Replica Parts (www.replicaparts.com) to keep things looking nice and clean.
We almost forgot to mount the fuel-pump cutoff switch for our Mass-Flo EFI system. It had only been tie-wrapped to the frame during the wiring and testing phase, but for it to work properly, it needs to be secured solidly to a section of the frame so that the switch will open and shut off the electric fuel pump in an impact. We found this spot at the end of the firewall that allows easy access to reset the switch by reaching up under the right end of the dash.	Before our Roadster's body can be bolted to the chassis for transport, we need to close up the driver's foot-box top section.	The outboard panel covers the pedal-box assembly, and we found that a small amount of percussive clearancing helped prevent the panel from rubbing against the clutch pedal's starter-interrupt switch.