Alright, the day has finally come and the SuperLite Coupe has safely made it into the garage. Very exciting of course and it wasn’t as tough to get it in there as it could have been. I did get pretty lucky though and I have some really great friends who I can’t thank enough.

The truck came around 8 am and after quickly looking up at the hill towards the general direction of my house, they called me and say “no way we’re gonna make it up there”. I was prepared for that to happen and due to a stroke of luck, my friend Ryan had the keys to our other friend’s Matt’s Ford F-150 Raptor who in turn had borrowed a flatbed trailer from Chris who we race Lemons with. How lucky. Unbeknownst to Matt’s slumbering self, Ryan commandeered the truck and trailer and met me at the shipper’s truck. Fortuitously, the trailer was about as flat as can be and had a very low Porsche on it the prior day, so we knew we could get a car that was sitting at best 2″ off the ground onto the trailer.

Once I had guided the shipper to a very flat part of San Francisco (try to find that…), the car came off and we started the transfer onto the trailer. This was pretty easy using some wood planks to make the trip up the ramp as flat as possible. It was easy to just push/pull our way through this. Once on, the ride up the hill was easy because the Raptor is a monster truck and Ryan’s trailer skillz were evident in reversing the trailer to in front of my garage rather adeptly.

We took our time through all this. It wasn’t a race, it was just a puzzle that needed to be solved, but at this point it did get a little more interesting. The wood planks were easy to use again, but we had only a relatively small opening to work with to get the car into the garage. When there’s no steering wheel, moving the wheels involves some brute force tugging and with a totally misaligned rear suspension, there really wasn’t a concept of “going straight”.

This was all at 0-1 mph, so nothing would really happen unless we really weren’t paying attention and I’m happy to say, nothing was bruised, not even egos. You can see in the picture how close we got to the one garage side.

Once in, Ryan helped me get the bodywork off and bring it into the yard. That was a great plan until the center section wouldn’t fit, so I’ve got some minor storage issues right now. I’ll figure it out, I’m not too worried. This evening I got to unpacking, inventorying and cleaning. Progress so far:

1. All bodywork off and stored under deck, except center section. Storage plans for that TBD.
2. Jacked up and wheels off, almost ready for shipment back. (these are loaners for shipment purposes until my real ones come)
3. Cockpit and front section cleaned, waiting for rear section until I work on engine.
4. Fuel tank out to access engine for minor repairs.
5. Front splitter removed. Just takes up space.

There were, of course, a few negative portions to the day, like my transmission not being in/with the car, various pieces missing, the steering wheel not mounted, options I ordered not set, so I’ll have to do a lot of sorting out. But at least I can get underway with some aspects of the build. The first system I’ll probably work on is the brakes: install pedals + reservoirs, mount lines, connect to calipers, bleed. Then start thinking about the engine, like how to clean it, maybe polish the intake, switch out the water pump housing and figure out the oil sump tank location and plumbing.