Below is an extract from Ralph's kit car build diary - to read more, please visit his web site.

Building The Cobra

It took a little while, but the wait has been worth it - initially scheduled for delivery in late November '99, I was able to travel to Tulsa the first weekend in February '00 (when the weather finally cooperated) and pick up the Cobra from RUCC.

It's now June of '03 - the car is virtually complete except for painting. Mostly due to financial priorities I'll likely wait a bit prior to painting and drive it "raw" for a while. There are a few trim pieces I'm missing, but these are purely cosmetic. The build process was not as long as it appears - much of the time was spent as I built a garage in parallel with the car as well as a significant amount of time was spent simply waiting on a few key parts. Although I did not keep track of my time, if I was to hazard a guess, I'd estimate I put in 300-400 hours between the car, engine and tranny builds.

Picking up the Cobra

I flew to Tulsa (Sand Springs), OK the weekend of 2/4/00 to take delivery of my kit. The delivery had been delayed due to weather (12" of snow fell on Oklahoma the previous weekend) and to powder coat the frame. These images show the trip down, back and unloading the car into my workshop.

Saturday, AM, Feb 5, 2000 - some final touches were needing completing:

Body Work

My part of the body work is getting close to being done. I'm doing the rough finishing, and enough work to be able to mount the body to the frame. I want the final work done with the body mounted to avoid any "dings" or stress on the paint. I plan on taking it to a custom paint shop for that work. The inner walls of the body will be painted black. The wheel wells have been coated with a rubber-based "sound deadening" spray "paint". The body has now been mounted and trim work is in progress....