Category: Misc.

Never really liked the way the trunk carpet was laying around the drop box I installed. I had to install the carpet in a lot of little pieces, and some of the overlaps weren’t staying down. Decided to do some trim work around the edges to clean it up and add some definition. Started with some 1/2×1 aluminum angle, cut to length, trimmed and notched then painted black. Installed with some 1/8″ rivets. I’ll touch those up with some black in a little while.

Got back to the roll bars. Received my tubing sander earlier this week, but couldn’t get started until this weekend because of some work travel. This sander came with lots of sanding belts… grits from 60 to 800. I didnt want to start too rough and make more work for myself, so I started with the 160 grit. Difficult to find a way to secure the roll bar without scratching it up, but came up with a wood clamp that seems to work OK. Spent about 10 minutes with the sander and 160 grit, and this is going to work. Yay!!

Thanks for still following and I’ll be posting more soon…

While waiting on my new tools to arrive, I got some work done on the Serpent Express Trailer. I dont know how much I’ll use it once the car is done, but its nice to have in case I want to do some traveling with the Boss.

I wired up and installed 3 additional LEDs to the back. The side units are bolted to the steel uprights inside, while the center is just bolted to the fabric. I used a 1/8″ thick strip of aluminum inside to back it up. Couldn’t mount it higher on the steel tubing because the joints were in the way.

The center light has the turn signal segments separated, while I wired the side lights to flash the entire unit for each individual signal.

Well, I have a video of the lights working, but it appears I can’t post it in my blog… doesn’t recognize the mpeg format. I’ll work on that.

Anyways, the other thing was to install a factory Ford Trailer Brake Controller on my F150. This is a sweet unit, as once the ECU is updated, it not only controls trailer braking, but displays its settings on the trucks central display. It also integrates with sway control, anti lock brakes and some other obscure functions. Expensive, but the best way to go.

Got some more trailer work planned for later… standby, and thanks for reading.

So I went back to trying to polish the roll bars. I stopped by ACE Hardware and bought a rubber pad for my drill with 3 packs of stick-on paper…

It was nice to have the speed, and this appeared it would work, but I was only sanding a strip about 1/8″ wide at a time. And sometime it would chatter across the work, creating spots where the sanding didnt work then it dug in too deep. Also, the big pad with my drill was almost impossible to get into the tight spots.

Gave up in frustration. Checked the internet, read some articles, and found that the pros are using what is called a tubing sander. They use it primarily for stainless handrails, which is exactly what I need. Did some searching and found this unit on Amazon with some pretty good reviews. It will be here early next week… I’ll let ya know what happens. In the meantime, I’ll figure out a way to secure the roill bars to my workbench.

Worked on my foglights a bit. You’ll remember this is the set I got from the manufacturer as it was their final proving set. The glass lenses have fogged a little bit, but I’m going to work on seeing if those will polish out, too. So I cleaned and painted the bracketry flat black…

Then installed the stainless grill in the center…

Then installed the lights.

You can see a bit of how the lenses aren’t perfectly clear, but thats OK… I got a $300 part for $50. I can afford to replace the lights with something different if I want to.

You can see the LED bulbs I installed, as everything on my car is LED. From Superbright LED, the unit on the left is a 27 piece H3 unit, made for fog lights, and on the right is a blue 5 piece that replaced the little 194 that was in there. Not sure how I will power the blue one yet… maybe tie it in to my parking lights. Hopefully the blue will go with a few blue accents I’ve incorporated into the car.

Once again, thanks for sticking with me. Back soon…

Been getting a few things done on the Boss since I heard the body is starting to be worked on. One of the biggest that I’ve faced is polishing the stainless Breeze rollbars.

This is a pic of how the bars look as they come. Its called a “brushed” finish, and is created when the tubes are straight by running them through a grinding machine.

So since my car has polished stainless sidepipes, polished stainless bumpers, chrome windshield frame, etc, I didnt want to have the roll bars brushed and look different from the rest of the car. I had done some I-net searches and got some quotes for the professionals to do it, and most wanted between $250 – $400… per roll bar. I decided to give it a shot myself.

My first attempt was with a 5″ orbital sander and 80 grit sandpaper. The problem with this is the flat surface of the sander doesnt get around the tube very well. Spent about an hour and got frustrated… just very little progress.

So I got some 40 grit paper, and while it did remove a lot of the brushed scratches, it was still not going as well as I thought it should. It appears what I need is not grit, but speed. I tried using my dremel with a small, flimsy 60 grit disc, and it ate the stuff off like crazy. Unfortunately, I destroyed 2 of those little discs in about 4 minutes. So I have more thought and work to do.

While I’m thinking on this, I wiped another item off the To Do List. I had bought these seatbelt bezels from Replicar Parts and hadn’t installed them because with my tall seats, I don’t believe you’ll see them. But since I have em, might as well install them. I removed the belts, drilled the mount holes, trimmed the carpet and installed the bezels. The lower holes I used pop rivets as they go into the support frame. The top fasteners are stainless screws, washers and locking nuts. The screws are way long, so I trimmed and filed those to be neat.

I think it lends a nice finished look instead of the belts just disappearing into the wall.

Thats about it for now. I’ll do more updates as things get done… with the nice weather coming now, I’ll be working on it mare and more.

Thanks for reading.

Been a while since I posted… about 2 months, I guess. Not much has been happening with The Boss.

Got a call yesterday from Jeff at Whitby’s that my car is now in the body shop. They have 4 cars in there… 1 is being final wet-sanded, 1 is being painted, 1 is in final bodywork and mine is in rough bodywork.

I asked Jeff to please take some pictures to send along to me as it goes through various stages, so hopefully those will be coming along.

Looks like this is gonna finally happen!!

Worked on finishing up the turn signals yesterday.  Got the SD Turn signal controller installed behind my switch panel and wired it into the new spring-loaded switch. I have lights! But when I tried the hazards, things went very sideways. The hazards were not flashing at all…. just staying on as long as I held the switch.

The hazards don’t have to go through the SD unit, so I decided to return them to standard using the LED flasher and regular switch. Somehow, I was now powering into the keyed ignition system so that all the gauges were bouncing and even the fuel injection system was priming. But it was doing it at the tempo of the flashing hazards! And the key was off.

After sitting down and drawing things out in schematic, I figured that I had installed the TS controller between the TS switch and the hazard circuit connection… The hazards were attached to the controllers output. The hazards were powering  through the TS controller outputs and probably the unit’s ground, back feeding everything on the car that has a ground.

So I removed the original wiring coming out of the hazard switch and installed it directly to the output terminals of the TS switch. This puts them before the controller, and attached to the controllers inputs. Success!!

I now have TS’s that only require a 2-4 second engagement of a spring loaded switch and turn off automatically. I have hazards that work from a momentary switch and will stay on until cancelled.

And those LEDS are nice and bright!

More on the Tangent lights.

I’ll be tearing this nice piece down this weekend and painting all the parts I dont want to see. I also took one of the lights apart and noted the bulb types. Placing an order with Superbright LEDs tonight for LED replacements to keep with my “All LED Lighting” theme. When those come in, we’ll get em installed and hook em up and see how they look. These are not your average 35 watt fog or driving lights… these are equivalent to 55 watt low beam headlights. Gonna light up the night!

Dec 25 was 11 months on the body at Whitby’s.  They said 6-9 months. They will barely even talk to me. Who knows when it will be done or if they even still know I exist. May have to go buy another one.

In the meantime, I’ve been bored, haven’t touched the car in months. Decided to update / fix a few things that have kind of bothered me.

One is my turn signals. I’m using a switch with On-Off-On clicking and I have to manually turn the signals on before a turn or lane change and then turn them off after. No auto-off. I KNOW I will be leaving them on and I’ll be THAT GUY running down the road with his nice bright LEDs flashing away. This I didn’t like, so I bought a turn signal controller from Signal Dynamics. Read here for details.

Auto turn signal shutoff! Yay!! This will require a few mods to accommodate the unit. First is my turn signal switch. I replaced the hard-click type switch to a momentary, still On-Off-On.  Then, since the SD unit is now taking care of the flashing, I removed the turn signal and hazard flasher units from the fuse box and installed 2 jumper wires. Maybe later I will drop the fuse box down and remove the wires from the box and splice them together.

I also replaced the Hazard light switch with a momentary On-Off that will act like pressing both L&R switches at the same time… this engages the hazard function of the SD unit until you hit the momentary again to switch them off.

While I had the switch panel removed, I also replaced the Headlight Hi / Lo beam switch. I had mistakenly installed a On-Off-On switch for the Hi / Lo… this means if I stopped in the middle, I didn’t have any headlights at all. No good. Now its just one way or the other… no more Off position.

I’ll finish it up this weekend and maybe try a video of how it works. No pictures to show since the switch panel still looks the same.

Sure do hope to hear from Whitby’s soon…

Part of my plan has always been to install Tangent’s driving / fog light kit, which installs in the oil cooler scoop.

An oil cooler is really not needed with todays oils on the street, even with some occasional racing. When I last contacted Tangent, they said the lights were no longer available, but they were looking at some new lights and showed me a pic. I didnt like them. Way too small and alien looking.

So I started looking around and thinking about what I would do with the cooler scoop. Cant just leave it empty, as anyone who looks can see right through to the ground.

I recently found some lights that I thought may work… Hella FF50’s.

Although they dont have the 5 watt running light of the original Tangent lights, and a plastic housing now vs the metal… I thought it would work.

I contacted Tangent once again and asked if they would sell a kit with no lights… and he responded that yes, he would, OR he would sell me the prototype kit with the original lights, although they may now be a bit hazy. He made me an offer I couldnt refuse… so I have what may be the first and last set of Tangent lights available on their way to me.

And if the original lights dont appear or function good enough, I can still try to fit the Hellas and of course upgrade to LED’s.

Score!!

Still getting ready for the call to bring the Boss 427 Go-Cart south…

The top of the drivers footbox has an access hole to be able to do some small maintenance in the future. However, the top part of the panel will be covered by the body, so no screws can be used there. I made some small slip-clips with a spacer the same thickness as the footbox aluminum and siliconed them together…

You can see I gave the edge a small bend to enable these to slide on better. Then I riveted them to the access panel…

I ended up only using 2, and it holds quite well. Now you can see how the smaller spacer gives enough room for the access panel to slide over the footbox panel. And here it is all installed with a few screws just along the bottom to hold it in place.

I’ll figure out what to do with those 3 empty, useless screw holes along the top edge. Not sure you’ll see em, but I know they are there.

Finishing up the footbox this afternoon…