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Esprit

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Everything posted by Esprit

  1. What direction have you/are you going in? I'd stick with OEM, at least then you'll know those corners are unlikely to give any issues for another 15 years or so. Air suspension (and early timing chains) really do seem like the only weaknesses on these cars.
  2. I remember viewing the wreck of my father's first Elise after he was almost killed in it. Blood splatter everywhere. Some poor sucker had to clean that shit out..... he lived though and it's now an endurance racer down in Otago.
  3. Looks to me (And this is purrrrre speculation) that the Jaguar got a bit of a fishtail on and crossed the median kerb onto the other side of the road, sitting broadside across the opposite lane. It's an 80km/h zone and being T-boned by a large stationwagon, which may have had little or no time to slow, gives this outcome.
  4. That Manheim car was a fatal. https://www.stuff.co.nz/auckland/107899234/police-confirm-20yearold-albany-crash-victim-was-michel-cooper Nasty business Also, no reason you can't run the exhaust under the rear subframe. E-Types do exactly the same and we run a big bore through there on ours and it never scrapes (well not there, we occasionally kiss the long-runner headers on full compression bumpy road steez)
  5. This one is owned by (and was built at TWR by) the crew chief of TWR's global ops of the time, who was in charge of the on-track operations of the XJS when they raced in the '80s. I often catch up with him when I pop down to my folks' place, he's got some fascinating tales. Here he is, on the right, when they came over and conquered Bathurst. His XJR-S is a thing of beauty, and was the only one built to full-fat spec. Excluding some of the bonkers Lister creations, it's probably the ultimately spec'd XJS you will ever find.... certainly I reckon it's the most desirable factory XJS I've ever come across.
  6. Have a soft spot for the XJS. One of my fathers' friends has a special-build Walkinshaw XJR-S. 6L, V12 Manual, 400bhp. Thing's a beast.
  7. We're gonna put one of those louvre systems in at hour place, but only in a few years once we've recovered from the pain of borrowing more than the combined GDP of half of Africa.
  8. I had my old aircon unit under the deck, it's a great place to have it. Especially for you, other side of the house from the bedrooms. At night when it's quiet, you do hear them from a few feet away, but so long as it's not right outside a bedroom window you're all gravy. Our aircon goes in next week.
  9. Looks epic! Our place is definitely going to be less "designer" especially in the bathroom..... Given we're introducing kids into the mix, everything has to pass the practicality/durability test. Also, I'm colourblind and Claudia is stylistically conservative, means our place will be boring in comparison. Loving how yours is turning out though!
  10. I want a Telstar XRi (I prefer the liftback shape and the ZE JDM goodness). Probably stick with the GTi6 a bit longer but the Telstar will make a cheap tow car. Decisions decisions.
  11. This build is spoogeworthyu! Top quality workmanship and by golly you don't f**k about! If this was me, I'd be three years in and would have just about finished stripping the donor shell.
  12. Haha tell me something I don't know Craig Was always going to take me more than a few years to fill it up, and between racing the Mazda and keeping the Lotus on form, it doesn't leave a lot of time and money for extra vehicles. Will possibly be acquiring an extra car or two in the coming year to have on the back burner as a project. Plenty of time yet, I'm trying to pace myself Good to hear that Pokeno's treating you well and it sounds like you've plenty of shed space there now to keep you happy!
  13. Good god Sheepers, this car is looking so unbelievably sweet!
  14. Pet hate when househunting was seeing places that obviously used to have internal access garaging that was turned into bedrooms... useless bastards ruining what was otherwise a good house!
  15. Manual? If auto you're dead to me.
  16. Well it's been a while since I've done a proper update. Had the Exige out on track a few weeks back at the Club Lotus NZ twilight trackday at Hampton Downs. Had a couple of fun sessions, and despite me not driving it too hard and the brakes protesting a little (the discs are well due for replacement) it still managed to lap in the 1:14s easily, within a second or so of my best times. On the way home the car started making a bit of a jangling sort of noise I knew all too well. I suspected that engine vibration had broken another manifold support bracket but inspection last weekend showed that the bolt that secures it to the block had come out and disappeared. It was about a 3 hour job to replace the bastard because it's probably one of the least accessible fasteners on the whole car! With only minimally skinned knuckles I managed to sort it. With that fixed, I was going to take the car up to the "Caffeine and Classics" monthly meet up in Takapuna. On the way up there though, I noticed the slight grinding/rubbing noise I occasionally get from the left rear was back and probably worse than ever. Everything felt fine though but I decided to go home. It's one of those annoying problems that you can't replicate on the jack just by spinning the wheel but a half hour of rolling the car back and forth in the garage pointed to it being the left outer CV joint making a little noise. The CV joints were one of the things I didn't do in the rebuild, I simply cleaned out and re-packed them with grease as well as cleaning up the salt corrosion and painting with POR15, so with all the track abuse I've given it,it made sense that one was likely to be on the way out. So, with a new CV joint here from EliseParts, I got to fitting. Here's the old CV off the car and on the bench: I was going to paint the new CV as I did the old one, but given the car doesn't see a lot of the winter running these days, I figured it'd stay looking okay as it was. It doesn't match the other side now, but I'll probably replace the right hand CV too before long as preventative maintenance. It all went nice and without a hitch really, which is nice. I thought I'd post up some photos of the wheel well area so y'all could see how the finishing job I did has held up over the last few years. While the car certainly isn't a daily driver it's certainly done a number of trips away and a dozen or so trackdays in the last couple of years, and it's been about 5 years since I did a lot of the initial work on the wishbones etc and they've held up really well I think! Just need to give everything a quick spanner check and torque up before I take it out for a test drive in the morning. The Club Lotus Christmas Breakfast is on in the morning and the show/shine, so I might head along there to test it out
  17. If you didn't get a de-embrittlement done on the springs immediately after plating, they're probably toast as they'll crack in service. Also, blasting springs tend to stress relieve them and make them soggy as hell. Springs should be painted or powdercoated and that's it. The rest is looking good
  18. Haha Glad you enjoyed seeing it! Maybe I will start a thread for the roach if I've got some free time... although obviously we can't mod it a whole hell of a lot!
  19. Well it's been a couple of quiet months for the Lotus over here. I always use it little in the winter, and despite it being an unseasonably warm/dry one over here I've had a bunch of other things on my plate which have kept me otherwise occupied. Now being a mortgage-slave, I can't really afford to abuse the Exige in the way I'd ideally like to, so I've decided that the Exige will become more of a toy than a track hack and will come out for the odd trackday here and there and also for some road fun. That way I can avoid breaking it and having to sell organs to get it fixed! However, I still have a track-fun itch that needs regular scratching so I've decided to go racing on the cheap, so a friend and I have decided to field a team for the 2kCup here in NZ (www.2kcup.com). This is basically a class for cars valued and purchased for less than $2000, sub 2 litre standard, normally-aspirated road cars. The idea is to basically buy it and race it completely unmodified. Some small modifications are allowed, and any changes to the car are limited to swapping out factory-optioned bits. Engines must be 100% standard, rollcages and race-seats and harnesses etc are optional to try and keep costs down and the cars are all slow enough that they're not really needed anyway. The sensible cars at the front of the field are SW20 MR2s and Honda Integra DC2s it would seem. Liking a challenge and to do things a bit differently, we decided to go completely left-field and contest it in a Mazda Lantis Type R... which is somewhat boat-like in comparison to the opposition! Our aim, however, is to have the best sounding car in the competition! Such a shame we have to run a stock exhaust system as it sounds hilarious with a straight-pipe! When we picked her up, she smelled like an ashtray, had various bits spraypainted matte-black, had completely the wrong suspension fitted and even had the remnants of stockings stretched over the lights as makeshift-tints! Beautiful! We christened her "The Cockroach" We set about tidying her up, getting it road-legal again (another series requirement) and sorting out the suspension: We also dropped as much weight as we could legally do, by removing things such as the sunroof (as the Lantis-R was available without one), so I decided to turn my hand at making up a carbonfibre sunroof-patch by making up a fibreglass mould: ... and then using it to lay-up a carbon sandwich panel on top of, which turned out pretty passable for a $2k junker! Initial track testing has shown that while we probably won't be in the hunt for the championship, we're about on the pace of the lead bunch and hopefully can have some good battles.... it's a laugh being on track and not having a care in the world about blowing it up or bending it! It means you can rag it mercilessly! Of course, having the new garage makes it a hell of a lot easier to do this kind of project and not having to worry about storing the Lotus or having cars in the way of each other when you want to work on one or t'other is nice! It's actually looking kind of emptyish at the moment as I've suddenly become the focal point for all my friends wanting to do jobs on their various machines! Back in on SEXIGE, it's still running really well, although I've still got a weeping gearbox casing which will need sorting in the mid-term. Given that the box needs to come out, I've decided I'm going to save up and fit a lighter flywheel and twin-plate clutch since the engine in this kind of tune really deserves something a bit less ponderous than the standard setup, and because I've already had one single-plate clutch fail on me, my trust in it is a little dented. I'll get them sorted out and over here before I pull the box off and apart to get the porous casting sealed up, which should fix the leak. It's only an annoyance value as in traditional Lotus fashion, the leaks always make a hell of a lot of mess for very little oil! The only other issue I've had recently is a case of running rich and a bit of a hot-starting issue where it's prone to flooding. After polling the sensors it seems that my TPS has gone, as last month I noticed it sitting at 14% throttle on idle, and while it's usually not that bad, a test drive today showed it to be sitting anywhere from 0.9% to 6.2%, which isn't right. I pulled the old one off and have a new one on the way to re-fit, which should hopefully save me the hassle in future of being stuck on a petrol-station forecort rapidly flattening my battery trying to fire it up! TPS Removed: And the offending item: And the car as she sits now: First day of spring here today so looking forward to putting some miles on her this summer and the odd track outing too
  20. And that's for a loom they've got a pattern for, as in I bet if you were to order a loom of similar complexity, for a different race car, the loom would cost about $11k+
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