West Coast Cobra Owner Build Chassis # 3299

[kitcarbp]

January 2015

The first pic Here is out of the paint booth at the body shop just after Christmas


Then back home after paint. What a long strange trips its been so far. Lol. My trunk lid sat leaning against the wall for months while I worked on the fuel tank installation

[kitcarbp]

January 2015

Now that the car is painted and back home in the garage I could plan the next steps. By this point in 2015 West Coast Cobra was winding down operations and getting harder to get a response out of them. I was hoping to order my interior but soon realized I was marooned and would have to fend for myself sourcing an interior. In the meantime I had plenty of work to do with installing my battery in the trunk and the assembling the fuel cell and installing it. One of the first parts I installed after paint was the LeMans flip top fuel filler cap. I used a 1969 Mustang filler neck which fit nicely. Underside shown below. My fuel tank is fabricated using a poly tank inside an aluminum box that came with the ebay body purchase. I built the poly tank to be able to open it back up and upgrade to an in tank fuel injection pump for the future fuel injection I will add

[kitcarbp]

Spring 2016

So after fruitless attempts of buying the interior from the now defunct WCC in winter of 2015, the car sat for over a year. I was over budget, way over budget after the body work so decided to design and fabricate my own interior. Ive never tried this before. “Look Mom..... no hands”. I watched alot of you tube on interior builders with alot of experience. I then found an interior material supplier that made it easy to buy the stuff I needed. The seats were the easy piece. Purchased Cobra branded seats from England using Factory Five. Simple. Then I disassembled them to install the heated seat elements

Aftermarket heated seat kits made it easy to incorporate them into my build

[kitcarbp]

Interior Planning Spring/Summer 2016

So my story is at this point of my build Im over budget but the body work and paint work turned out really nice and while not show quality from 1 foot away its awesome. None the less my driver paint job cost way more than I expected. Making the hard top fit correctly was very costly in labor and contributed to busting the budget. But it looks great.

So now with my seats sourced from Cobra brand in England, I started shopping interior suppliers to help me build my own imterior.. How hard can this be? Foam, vinyl, carpet, measure three times, cut twice. Lol. And a bunch of glue
Answer: I used this company to find out

https://www.albrightssupply.com/

[kitcarbp]

Here are pics of the interior fabrication and installation

[kitcarbp]

Spring 2018.

So the way I like to learn new fab skills is the tried and true ; crawl, walk and run process. So I started with the carpet as the first step of my interior. For the carpet top edge that ringed the cockpit, I decided to get it binded at a local carpet store that had the binding equipment. I purchased the silver color binding edge and took it to the carpet place. It was like $20 for each piece to have bound. THe binding machine does it in like 1 minute, super fast. The wood steering wheel shown was only used during the build and not used in the final design



I used this high temp spray glue for carpet and foam and vinyl. I put that Sh!2 on everything!
It sticks to everything ! I had to mask off most of the car to keep the paint safe

[kitcarbp]

Here are more progress photos of the interior. I selected a matte low gloss vinyl for the dash and doors that I matched to the Cobra seat vinyl material. All of the backing boards I made were cut from 1/8 or 1/4 inch inch Black textured ABS since it had to be water proof if rained on. ABS is so easy to work with, you score it with a knife and break it.

The best part was laying out my dash pattern on the living room carpet while my wife was away. I had masking tape and foam trimmings everywhere! The Schroth racing belts popular for autocrossing Are shown here installed