Side Repeaters
by Gerry Hawkridge
A neat way to fit side repeaters to your Cobra replica
without drilling your bodywork.
A neat narrow repeater light is available, made by LEP, and with care it can be
squeezed between the side louvres on a 427 or 289.
It has a self adhesive type backing, which can be easily attached to a simple aluminium bracket, which in turn can be attached to one
"blade" of the louvres with double sided tape.
First make up a cardboard template as shown in the picture,
and then when you are happy that it fits your car, make two up, one left handed
and one right handed out of thin alumium sheet. So
easy and neat !!!
Grab
Handles
by Gerry Hawkridge
The original 289 Cobras, FIAs, and some of the 427
road cars were fitted with grab handles for the passenger. Recently we were
dismantling an untouched original car, and so we were able to obtain the following
bits of info. for you.
The handles (part no:1/242 HP2) were secured with 2
off 3/16" raised head countersunk slotted screws and nuts.
The body was drilled through on the cockpit edge, so that the screws passed
through the aluminium and the tubular substructure.
The photograph clearly shows the positions of the holes (Car shown is
Rear Indicator
by Gerry Hawkridge
The original Cobras had the rear indicator filament shared with the brake light
filament in the rear light. Back in the 60's this was quite OK, but many
replicas produced later, or indeed original cars registered in other countries
may be required to fit a separate amber indicator. It is nice to be able to
keep the original L542 rear lights, but if you are required to fit an
additional rear indicator, it is nice, especially on an original car, not to
cut more holes in the bodywork.
These photographs show the installation of indicators on a 1964 original Mark 2
289 car, which was required to have them for T.U.V. in
Those after that little bit of special detail, should notice the nice curved
ends on the rear bumper tubes, where top and bottom tubes are welded during
manufacture. They do not come to a sharp point, as on some replica rear
bumpers.
Camber Gauge for less than 2 quid !!!!
by Gerry Hawkridge
Adjusting suspension for some of us is quite a mystery, or can be ! Most readers probably end up taking their car to a
specialist, then if they want to experiment, every
change can become quite expensive. Some of the more affluent among us probably
shell out for "all the gear".
For track days, it can be quite beneficial to put a bit more negative camber on
the wheels, pushing that much harder can cause a bit more wear on the outside
of the tyres, often by introducing more negative
camber, then you can present the tread more evenly to the road, improving grip
and reducing tyre wear. For road use, it is important
to run less negative camber, to reduce the wear on the inside of the tyres.
Likewise, for track days it is a good idea to increase tyre
pressures to stop the tyres "rolling off the
wheels", but, obviously for road use this will cause the centres of the tyres to wear more
quickly.
For years I have set camber using an old spirit level, first making sure that
the car is sitting on a level piece of concrete, usually my garage floor. I
then set the camber by measuring carefully the distance at top and bottom of
the rim to the vertical side of the spirit level. Not quite to F1 standards,
but still amazingly accurate if done carefully, and certainly good enough for
most of us !!!
However, it is a bit fiddly and tricky measuring, and holding the spirit level
steadily to do this, so I came up with the following idea.
I purchased a nice 24" aluminium spirit level
for only £1.69 in our local DIY superstore.
I then drilled (4.2 mm) and tapped (5mm) two holes in one side, to accept a
couple of 5mm x 40mm long pan head screws, I positioned them exactly 15
3/8" apart, to suit the 15" rims on my car, but obviously you could
drill and tap a series of holes at 1" intervals, to suit any particular
wheel size. By a little bit of messing about, I worked out that on a 15"
wheel, 1/8" or 3.2mm is as near as dammit 1/2 a
degree.
So, if you carefully set the screws with a ruler, or better still a vernier caliper, so that one protrudes by say 1/8"
more than the other, you can use this simple tool to adjust your camber to 1/2
a degree, obviously 1/4" or 6.4mm gives 1 degree and so on.
Ten minutes work, and less than two quid, can't be bad.
Update
by Ian Hopley
Nice idea and just a quick couple of thoughts:
1. If you tap an M6 coarse thread instead of the 5mm
thread, the pitch of an M6x1.00 bolt is, well, 1.00mm so one complete turn of
an M6 screw is exactly 1mm. This may help people rather than messing about with
verniers.
2. If this was going into a kit car article, you could produce a handy table of
distance between screws against no. of turns
difference to give angles and save calculating it (STATUS could do this if you
want but you'd have to give us a range of distances between screws).
3. Most people will put the spirit level on the floor to check that it's level. I think that this only really tells you that the
bit the spirit level is on is level. It's worth putting it on a STRAIGHT piece
of box section at least as wide as the car is so that it spans a lot of the
floor. This will also tell you if the floor is flat because you will see the
gaps under the bar.
4. I'm not sure how accurate (or sensetive) a £1.69
spirit level is so it might be worth doing some tests on a known vertical
surface. Do you know of any engineering workshops near you that have a surface
table and an angle plate you could use for a few minutes? Alternatively, post
one up to the university if you want.
5. I've been wondering about making tracking gauges using the same sort of
principle but with those cheap spirit levels you can buy with a laser in one
end. Although the lasers aren't especially accurate from one level to the next,
I'm sure you could get sufficient accuracy by shining the dot on to a card or
scale just in front of the car. Any thoughts?