Building a '67 Cobra Kit Car from Scratch: Jim's New York Hot Rod

If you're not familiar with the Cobra kit car world, here's the short version: the AC Cobra was a lightweight British roadster that Carroll Shelby stuffed a Ford V8 into in 1962. What came out was one of the most iconic performance cars in American motorsport history — 427 cubic inches, a body that looked like it was designed to go fast even standing still, and handling that rewarded drivers willing to learn it the hard way. The '67 body style specifically refers to the wider-body 427 roadster, with flared fenders and a stance that makes most modern sports cars look apologetic.

Because the original cars are out of reach for most people — they trade at six figures and up when they surface at all — a cottage industry of kit car manufacturers has been building their own versions for decades. These aren't replicas with an apology attached. Companies like Factory Five Racing, Kirkham Motorsports, and Superformance build chassis and bodywork engineered to accept modern donor components — engines, transmissions, suspension pieces — and the result is a car that drives better than most things on the road and looks exactly like what it's supposed to look like.

Jim asking the group for info on the '67 Cobra is Jim in research mode. He's getting ready to build one, and he wants to understand what he's getting into before he starts making cuts. That's the right order of operations.

Jim's message is doing a lot of heavy lifting in a few sentences. Let's unpack what's actually happening in this phase of the build.

"Getting everything symmetrical" sounds obvious but it's the unglamorous foundation of the whole project. On a kit car, you're not dropping components into a factory-engineered subframe that's already been validated for alignment — you're fitting donor parts to a chassis that may need adjustments, shimming, and measurement at every step to make sure the suspension geometry is centered, the ride height is consistent side-to-side, and nothing is going to track crooked once it's moving under its own power. Every alignment spec you're going to live with on the street has to be established here, before powder coat, before paint, before any of it. You set this stuff now because you can't easily undo it later.

The body modification situation is its own project inside the project. A Cobra kit body is a fiberglass shell — it arrives in sections, and it has to be fitted to the chassis by cutting holes for the frame rails, trimming firewall clearances, modifying the wheel wells for the actual suspension travel the build will have, and getting everything lined up so the body sits level and looks right. You're essentially tailoring a suit that was made to be tailored. The fit only happens after a lot of measuring and a lot of patience.

And then there's the sequence that makes kit car builds so time-consuming: completely disassemble, powder coat, reassemble. You can't powder coat the chassis with parts on it. You can't powder coat with wiring harnesses or brake lines routed. So everything that's been fitted and measured and shimmed gets marked, photographed, disassembled down to bare metal, sent out for powder coat, and then reassembled exactly as it came apart. That process alone is months of work if you're doing it right. Jim knows this. He said it himself — long way to go.

"Modified to get it down to a good ride height with no interference" is doing a lot of work in one sentence, and it's worth breaking down what that actually means.

On a kit car, you're fitting a donor engine — likely a V8 out of a Mustang, Corvette, or LS-platform vehicle — into a purpose-built chassis that was designed to accept that engine in a general sense, but not necessarily in the specific combination Jim is running. The cross member is a structural chassis tube that runs transversely across the frame, and it determines where the engine sits longitudinally and how low it can drop before it hits something it shouldn't.

Engine angle matters more than most people think about. The angle at which the crankshaft centerline sits relative to the driveshaft affects U-joint operating angles, and when those angles are too steep or unequal, you get vibration under load — sometimes subtle, sometimes violent, always getting worse over time. High U-joint angles cause premature wear, and at the power levels these builds run, "premature" becomes "sooner than you think." Getting the engine sitting at the right angle before anything is permanent isn't optional.

When Jim says the engine angle was "so far off," that means the kit's default cross member position put the engine tilted in a way that would cause problems. The solution is to modify the cross member — cut it, reposition it, reweld it — so the engine sits at a correct angle and the chassis drops to the intended ride height without the engine or oil pan fouling on something. That's fabrication work. Real fabrication work, not bolt-on work. And it has to be correct before anything else on the build makes sense.

This is exactly the kind of problem that separates kit car builds that get finished from kit car builds that stall out in someone's garage for five years. Jim found it early, addressed it, and moved on. That's the right call.

Christmas Day, 70 degrees — Jim's in the shop working on the Cobra, bonfire at 4, a few pops. That's the build right there. No drama, no ceremony — just another good weather day that happened to fall on a holiday, and Jim used it. (Jerry, who the car's being built for, spends his winters down in Tennessee — hence the warmth. Jim's still in New York doing the actual wrenching.)

This is what long builds actually look like. There's no single day where it comes together. It's dozens of days like this one — a holiday, a Saturday, a random warm afternoon — strung together over months and years. If you're not putting in those days when the weather is right and the shop is calling, the build doesn't move. Jim's moving it.

Jim's Cobra kit car is in the phase that separates serious builds from abandoned ones: geometry first, fabrication second, powder coat after everything is sorted. The cross member has been modified. The engine angle is getting right. The suspension is being set to ride height before any of it gets permanent. That's not the exciting part of a build log, but it's the part that determines whether the finished car actually works the way it's supposed to.

Kit car builds are long. A Cobra done right — body fitted, chassis powder coated, everything disassembled and reassembled in the correct sequence — is easily a year or two of consistent weekend work, more if you're sourcing parts carefully and doing your own fabrication. Jim's not rushing it. He said it himself: long way to go. But he's doing it in the right order, and that matters.

When this thing comes together — '67 Cobra body, sorted geometry, powder coated chassis, V8 at the right angle — it'll be a car Jim built right. We'll keep posting updates as they come through the group chat. Jerry picks it up when it's done. Jim gets the satisfaction of having built it right.

Steve posted four photos on the morning of April 19th. The Cobra is done in the ways that matter visually — black body, hood up in the first shot with the amber running lights on, radiator visible. It looks like a car. It looks like a '67 Cobra kit car that someone spent serious time on.

Side shot shows the exhaust routing: raw steel side pipes running along the body at door-sill height. No chrome yet, no wrapping. Functional. The car's sitting on floor jacks, which is the honest answer to "is it done?" It is not done. But it runs.

Interior: billet aluminum spoke steering wheel with a wood rim, chrome gauges in the dash, gray ribbed seat upholstery. Indicator lights in the dash cluster. It looks like a kit car cockpit should look — which is to say it looks like a legitimate sports car from the front seat, because that's what it is.

Engine bay: Ford Big Block FE, chrome air cleaner, polished valve covers. That's the engine Steve sourced the PerTronix Flame-Thrower D134630 for — the distributor rated for the 5.8L/352 and 6.4L/390 FE family. This is the engine. It fills the bay the way a big block should.

The Cobra finally fired — but it was running on six cylinders instead of eight. Not a misfire from a tune issue, not a timing problem. A brand-new Pentex distributor with a defective cap, straight out of the box. It had never been tested before it went on the engine, because it was new. Brand-new parts fail. It happens less often than worn parts fail, but it happens, and when it does you spend an afternoon chasing a ghost before someone checks the obvious thing first.

Steve saw it coming. He knew the distributor had never been run before installation. When the engine came up rough, he told Jim to check the cap. Jim checked the cap. The cap was bad. Cylinders 3 and 7 — dark, no spark. The Pentex went in the parts bin and Jim bought an MSD distributor instead. MSD has been making ignition components for high-performance V8s for fifty years. If you're going to put a distributor in a Cobra kit car, MSD is the right call. The Pentex was worth knowing about.

Jamie's response — "So we all have running problems 😂" — is accurate. Between Steve's BMW lifter tick on first cold start and Jim's Cobra running on six, it was that kind of weekend in the group chat. The machines are moving. The problems are the proof. You don't have running problems on a car that isn't running.