I’ve been mostly working on the electrical system and, in particular, the instrument panel. Much of my Cobra time has been spent thinking about the electrical system, learning about connectors and trying out different techniques.
I decided to make a ‘competition’-style instrument panel and purchased some Classic Instruments gauges. I received Autometer Ultra Lites with my purchase from F5 but decided that I don’t like the look for a 60’s car. The Classic Instruments are ‘classic’ for sure. One of the characteristics of the original Cobra speedometer was a reverse reading gauge. Smith’s gauges are like this but I decided to go with a typical clockwise winding of the speedo. It’s interesting that the aviation industry has studied human / control interactions and has concluded that gauges that have counter-indicators are not good. All the Classic Instrument gauges below wind clockwise.
I made a number of mockups of the gauge layouts using some posts on the Factory Five build site as a guide. There are many personal approaches to gauge layouts—some quite simple, with many switches hidden, and some quite elaborate. My preference is to have the switches, etc., all easily accessible on the main panel:
Which became this:
Cutting the holes was quite a challenge. I used a fly-arm hole cutter whose directions explicitly say to not use in a hand drill. However, I don’t have a drill press, so I set the drill’s clutch to loose and ran the drill at about 200 rpm. It took roughly 5 min. per hole but the product was perfect. The EAA builders’ website has a demonstration of using the hole cutter in a hand drill so I thought the technique isn’t all that out there!
I asked my wife her opinion of the dash layout, as she has a great sense of style, and she said, ‘You need a glove box to balance the dash’s look.’ I responded that race cars don’t have glove boxes but that went nowhere so I’ve been working on fabricating one. There are several builders on the F5 forum that have made very nice glove boxes (one vendor was selling glove boxes for the Cobra but he is no longer doing so) and my glove box is a combination of their efforts. In short, I wrapped aluminum flashing around a form that I made out of wood and reinforced the shape with fiberglass.
Below is the test fitting of the glove box in the instrument panel.
