Punch list

There are 81 items on my Spyder punch list.

The list has actually grown over the past two weeks since I made it, even though I tackled several items already.

But the end is basically in sight. One of the items is “Go to MVA and get titled.”

Happy New Year!

Spent the last few days re-making my breather/fake oil tank out of steel. The original aluminum one kept getting dented and I broke the breather nipple off it twice. It wasn’t good enough. So the car gained about 18 ounces.

Here’s the one I made in the spring of 2018.

Brazing thin aluminum sheet is not my forte, turns out. Or, more realistically, making this can out of sheet aluminum was folly. Particularly as the filler neck was steel. Those are pop rivets holding it on—not likely oil tight in the unlikely event someone dumps a quart in there.

Anyway, instead of epoxying the little pipe back on a second time I just dug into the scrap pile. The old door from the old electrical fuse panel box had some good dimensions.

A little folding, a little welding and, yes, a little epoxy to fill my flux core efforts…

Bigger rivets this time….

(these are epoxied in as well)

Black paint this time:

This would only hold maybe two quarts, the originals would probably hold four. But this one has to work with a flat firewall—not the concave thing that allowed for the originals’ teardrop shape. And this one needs to share space in the corner with a three-quart Accusump accumulator, an actually functional bit of high-performance kit that allows the engine to be pre-oiled before startup. That’s better than the originals’ dry sump system could do, and kind of a big deal for an engine that’s likely to see fairly scant, seasonal use.

While I was at it, I switched the hold down strap from longitudinal to latitudinal, to better mimic the originals, and added a top vent like the real deals had.

Here’s what we ended up with:

Here’s 550 0030’s oil tank:

This car:

0033 from a similar vantage point:

I installed the body tag under the dash too.

And set about installing the backup light. Thought I had a problem with the transaxle: the switch worked by hand, but not when I shifted into reverse! I was about to panic when I checked and found that what i thought was reverse was still second gear. A bit more adjustment on the shift cables got the gear I needed, but I still have to do the permanent wires.

80 items to go.

 

 

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