Building our AC Cobra 289 LeMan

Once the throttle peddle and pivot where fitted, we moved onto fitting the throttle linkage to the carburettor. This is something we have been thinking about for a few weeks. We had the option to get the bits from Gerry but Mark wanted to design and make our own system. We had pictures of Andy Gordon’s Cobra at Silverstone, once again we used his car as the inspiration as we thought the solution he found was quite a neat one.

Mark spoke to his engineering department at work, asking them if they could manufacture the blades for the rod linkage and also some stainless steel strips, cut to size, that we plan to make a bracket from and mount to the inlet manifold. We have made a temporary bracket for now, that we will replace with a better one later. We have marked up for the new bracket that we hope to get our uncle Dave to wield for us.

We fitted the rose joint on the top of the footwell first. we then slid the 10mm rod into it. We then put another rose joint on the other end which we lined up and marked the hole to be drilled on our temporary bracket fitted to the manifold. Then drilled the hole and fitted the rose joint onto the bracket. We then fitted a blades to each end of the transverse rod.

We linked the blade to the carb using 2 female rose joints and 8mm rod. we had to tap a thread to both ends. We connected the other end to the peddle in exactly the same way using a shorter 8mm rod.
It took a little time adjusting the lengths of the rods to get the travel of the pedal correct but it works really well. We have just got the final bracket to make and fit now to finish this off.

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We started today thinking it was about time we fitted the peddle box. As we had already cut the hole in the footwell ages ago, its a job we could now do as the body is back on. The bolts go through the floor and flat section of the chassis and it was just a case of lining it up, marking up and then drilling the holes through. As the end of these bolts are exposed under the car, Mark had bought some stainless steel M8 bolts for this job, so they won’t corrode when exposed to the weather. Due to its position it proved a bit awkward getting these in and getting them tight. Mark bumped his head on several occasions while he had his head stuck down the footwell trying to get the bolts in (Hopefully knocked some sense in). We had noticed before hand that the floor of the body wasn’t quite square so we had to use a small piece of fibreglass, that we saved from cutting the original hole, to pack the front edge, getting a good seal between the vertical edge and engine bay.

Next up was to negotiate the position of the throttle peddle. The throttle pedal is posted through a hole in the top of the peddle box with the throttle pedal housing mounted on top inside the engine bay. We read through the Hawk manual and it didn’t really give any hard and fast rules for the position, although when we had spoken to Gerry at the NEC he told us to aim to mount it about an inch from the front of the peddle box. So this is what we aimed for. We initially drilled a small hole posted the peddle through to get a rough position. We wanted the accelerator peddle slightly further forward than brake and clutch peddles but for all 3 peddle to be equally spaced apart. From there we marked up the holes, drilled and fitted. This was also a bit fiddly due to it being under the wing and had to use a 90degree drill bit for this job.

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Happy New Year to everyone. Just a quick update as the last post was a while ago now. The cobra build was put on hold over christmas as I was away in NYC and Mark had his Uni work to crack on with. Even so, we have ordered more bits, fuel tank, radiator, throttle linkage, that we are waiting to arrive. We’re hoping to get some stuff done this weekend so more posts coming soon.

Mark has spent a little time fitting the fuel pressure regulator to the nearside inner wing, see pic below. He then cut a piece of fuel pipe to length to fit from the carb to the fuel filter/regulator. Now that we have a piece of pipe to length, we have sent it to BGC Motor sport components to make a braided pipe with the banjo connectors to go from the carb.



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