on May 2, 2013
When groups of people embark on big projects like this there are inevitably times when life gets in the way. We have run across that recently. With the car SO close to being ready to drive it is so difficult to not be able to make the final steps to finish it up right away. But alas, what can you do when life gets in the way?!
So what have we been up to? Well Matt W sold his house and moved to another part of town, Matt F got a new job, Evan has been… wait. you don’t want to hear this you want to know about the car! Ok, lets see where we left off. We redid our seat mounts to adjust our seat positions a bit. Our original location pushed us back just a little too far with the new location we have really fixed up our position.
Well, lets start with this little tid bit… IT RUNS!
Our fuel cell has solid mounting now. We took some time to fully enclose our firewall while building a nice solid frame for the fuel cell. The Solid frame is also secured to the car by some very solid mounting. The goal is to make sure that no matter what the forces the front of the car sees the fuel cell is solidly mounted. This is a lot of weight that is being held in the front of the cage so we are being extra careful planning out how it is held in place.
Steering has been a bit of a question mark for us as well. We have had a steering wheel for a little while and been a bit hesitant to install it. Why you ask? Well, if we are welding on a steering wheel we really want to have our alignment done so the wheel is on there reasonably straight… right? Well we have done a few things to work that out. First we machined a nice piece to keep the steering wheel concentric with the steering column as we weld it. Second we have installed the stock steering wheel to get us through till the car is aligned in order to be sure that we weld on the wheel properly.
Wiring has been continuing as well. For some reason we managed to receive one of the few defective gauges out there and troubleshooting that has been a bit tricky. With multiple phone calls to the retailer we purchased it from and the manufacture finally the problem was solved some of our wiring issues have been solved. Wiring continues and we are really excited to have our ne Baja Designs lights fired up very soon.
Tires, well, the car won’t go anywhere without tires and we are now sure that we have some suitable rubber under the car. BFG All Terrains are now bolted on and ready to go.
There have been a few other odds and ends that we were able to finish up recently…
We did have a bit of a distraction recently. We received a phone call and pulled the emblem off our car and shipped it out immediately. Why? You ask? Well, the reason was simple. We had the opportunity to have our vehicle blessed by the Pope. Yeah, that’s right. The Pope! So our Emblem took a trip to the Vatican. Every little bit counts… right?!
So what do we have left? We do have a few welds left, we have to finalize our harness bar and acquire the final piece to our fuel line which is being made right now. There is a bit of wiring to do there are a few other odds and ends to button up. At our current pace this should take a few weeks and we can’t wait to drive this thing around.
We’ll be checking back in soon, hopefully with video of the car driving around and big smiles on our faces.