[LoBelly]

Thankyou all for your kind words

and for that news flash Stephen.

My brother got a temporary permit today and so we did a bit of driving, even got to drive the car myself today.

During the test drives today we had an issue with the back of the car stepping left when we got off the throttle. Have redone the bearing spacers in the rear hubs to remove a little play and we'll see how that goes.

Old Smokey was a bit off on the first run and sounded/felt like it was pinging so we pulled in to grab some octane boost - one of the leads was off <doh> , after that the engine seemed pretty willing down low, but hasn't been happy to rev to hard - we keep thinking there should be more in there. But, we haven't put a timing light on it yet (can't find) - advancing the timing a bit by ear made a big difference so we'll have to look harder for a timing light.

My first drive was a blast - cruised around to begin with while getting the feel. The shifter is nice and smooth and clutch operation doesn't take much pedal so once I get the feel for the gates I expect I'll be able to move through those quickly. The car rides really nicely and feels great being out in the open. The side-pipes have only some home-made baffles that I thought up and I was worried about restricting the engine so they really only take some edge off. The cobra sits nice an flat and is very well behaved (apart from that earlier issue) The main drama I had was that my belly pushed the quick releas onto the steering wheel in one turn and it grabbed on the release and everything disengaged at once - eek.

Opened the throttle a couple of times in 2nd then up to 3rd, man - its so rapid - even with only a 289 and my tall diff. I expect those of you with your cars are going 'welcome to the club' to those of you still building - keep going your gunna love it.

Anyway - at the end of the day Old Smokey might not last - after sitting for so long the carbie took a rebuild to run properly and while doing the rear end some green liquid was spotted, so some detectiving was done and it looks like a head gasket. The expectation is that the big sit basically degraded a lot of stuff in the engine and so another is planned.

Build or buy - mild or wild - how much of what. Time to hit the spreadsheet.

LoBelly