The Factory Five AC Cobra build officially got underway this past weekend. Starting with the more than 25 boxes of parts, we took all of the bags and boxes and organized them on the workbench. We then took the 30 pages of parts inventory and started to go through them making sure all the bolts, washers, nuts and assorted parts were there. It was a very good thing we did that because a bunch of parts that the list indicated were there, were not included. We didn’t have the pedals, pillow bushing for the steering, no upper control arms for the front suspension, no hubs for the rear suspension and a bunch more misellanious parts were missing.
Bill still has not got confirmation when the motor and transmission will be available and still has no interior or wheels and tires. As you can see in the pictures, we started with the body and chassis on jack stands on Saturday morning at 9:00am and by 5:00 pm that afternoon, we had inventoried all the parts and stripped the body off the chassis and took all the assorted aluminum panels off leaving just the bare chassis as the starting point.
With the 4-inch instruction manual in hand we attempted to start the build. In typical Do It Again Garage fashion, the first thing we needed to do was put together the front suspension. Well as I said earlier, we didn’t have the upper A Arms or the upper ball joints so the build was halted as fast as it started.
At this point, we plan on putting together a list of the missing parts and taking a trip down to the Factory Five factory in Wareham, MA in hopes of securing the parts we need to get the build started. Hopefully in our next update we will be able to share some updated photos showing the suspension all put together, until then, we will be fighting the missing parts battle and any of you that work on cars knows how frustrating that can be.
