Esprit

They expired in 2005, so ran out a month ago... hence why I replaced them... I want to do competitions this year.

yeah, need the rear lights and everything to be covered.

Well, a fruitful weekend thus far. Started out last night by fitting the alternator heat shield. This is a little bastart to get fitting right but I managed it in the end: I also managed to loctite the studs into the ITG air filter to make fitting it easier. This was then refitted to the car and the intake trunking added. I'll probably make up a new intake trunking as the Lotus OEM one is always too short on the Exiges, but the original one will do for now until I can find something better. At least it draws air from the right place! I then set about removing the old OEM harnesses. These were still fine for road use but were only FIA valid until 2005. As I plan to do some competitive driving with the car, I'd need harnesses that were current, so the old ones had to go: These made way for the new Schroth Racing Profi II FE ASM harnesses. These are identical to the original (apart from the fact that the originals were branded with "Safety Devices" labelling. The rear fascia then had to come off to allow me to finish up some stuff back there. A good chance to have one last look at all the wiring/relays/ecu/alarm gear back there before it's sealed up Another job that was done while that was off was to re-fit the engine breather catch tank: And then this afternoon, I've been busying myself unwrapping the seats, giving them a good clean-off and installing them.... my car has seats again!!! I spent a good half hour sitting in them, strapped in checking how everything felt (and even making occasional "BRRRRM" noises.... I couldn't start the car today because it was pissing with rain and the garage is full behind the car.) It's given me a better idea on how/where to mount a couple of things and FINALLY feels like my old girl again. Another job I did today was to pull out the boot release cable as it was seizing up a bit. This came into work with me and I managed to pull a bunch of rust and crud out of it. The cable was in great nick though so I greased it up and reassembled it. The seats and rear fascia will have to come out again before I finish the car as they need to be out to fit the rear clamshell. However, this will be delayed because I can't fit the rear clam until I've got the rear heat shield fabricated. I cant to get the car WOF'd and Re-registered before that'll be here so the rear clamshell will be fitted with only the essential fasteners holding it on to allow quick installation/removal. It'll then be properly reinstalled once the heat shield is fitted and properly shimmed up to the rest of the body. Getting closer every day!

Good news everyone! Spent some time on the car last night. Managed to get the gaearbox oil level sitting right again (will check again before it hits the road in earnest and the engine oil pressure raised on the starter again with no plugs or fuel. I got the coolant system refilled and static-bled as well. I then had to cable-tie the coil in place as the coil bracket is off being anodised and connect up the last few sensors. I'm going to have to go back over some of the loom routing as some of it needs to move a half inch or so here and there, but on the whole it's pretty good. Then there was nothing left to do but kick the bitch in the guts! I then shut up shop for the night. The best news is that this morning there's no puddles of either oil or coolant underneath the car. The join between the engine and gearbox bellhousing is bone dry with no evidence of leakage there, to that's hopefully a sign of the new main-seal doing its job! Time will tell obviously, but after running the car similarly initially (see the earlier youtube vids of the Exige first and second start-ups, there were definitely drips of oil on the ground so already we're doing better than we were. I've got PLENTY of jobs to carry on with now. I've got to re-do the way the airbox is mounted on (loctite some studs into the air filter rivnuts) so that the airbox is easier to mount and dismount. I've also got a few more rivets to set into the boot area and the toe link balljoints to lubricate. I've got some painting of the cut fibreglass on the rear clamshell to do to seal it up and that'll probably be as much as I can get through tonight. That she's up and running again is a big bonus, especially since the new starter seems to be doing its job just fine! Onwards ho!

Twin Pinto-engined boso!

Right after I fit the roof-rack

Great success! For the first time since Oct 16th last year, the car is home again! Now we can do a bit of rework to get the old girl fired back up again, run her up and down the road a couple of times (just for fun) then get to work bolting the rest of her back together! A very welcome sight! A garage full of Lotus!

Well we found the source of the oil leak and as suspected it was the rear main seal. The leak wasn't out of the lip however, it was leaking between the seal and the block. It seems this was down to two reasons: 1) The seal was assembled into the block without silicone sealant as per the Rover manual. Sealant will be used this time around, which should prevent the same happening again. 2) Looking at the seal removed and the replacement seal we got from Rover NZ, the seals are of slightly different design. The OEM rover seal has a ribbed outer-face where it locates into the spigot bore in the block and crank ladder. The seal from my seal kit (that was leaking) was a smooth-bore. The OEM design should be slightly more resilient to leaking here, sealant or not. Hopefully this time around, careful assembly and a fresh seal will prevent the same thing from happening. The good thing is that the engine and box seems oil-tight otherwise, so I anticipate no dramas once we get the engine back in the car tomorrow. FInally I'll be able to get the old girl back here and begin working to put her back together again. Other jobs completed today include sending a batch of stuff out for anodising. This will take until mid next week because many places are still shut down for the christmas break... fingers crossed I'll have everything back in time to make use of it before the weekend after next!

Managed to get out to see the car yesterday. Sadly the engine's still not out, which I'm a bit disappointed about. By the time this oil leak's sorted it'll have taken a month to sort out on its own... that's a month of fine weather I could have been using to run the car in and get sorted. Not happy. But still, all going well it'll be sorted early this week so I can get the old girl home again... WELL overdue. Yesterday involved checking a couple of new brackets for fit before I do final work on them before anodising. Doing this work up-front prevents having to bodge things in place and make them look like a dog's breakfast. Also yesterday I managed to get the new PowerLite starter mounted on the car. Here's the old Rover 1.4kW starter in situ. In addition to looking ugly it was drawing a lot of current to crank the engine (especially due to the fact that the engine takes a while to crank now that we're running sequential injection with the Rover flywheel trigger) and causing voltage drop issues with the ECU gear. And here's the new PowerLite unit in situ. Looks better and should help lower current draw under cranking Coincidentally, while I was there, I had a U2U from Eric (BlackS190) who wanted to see what I'd done with the relocation of the IAT sensor, so I'll throw up a couple of pics to answer the question: Here's the original VHPD IAT sensor in the intake runner for #4 cylinder: Due to the heat soak that the manifold suffers from the head, the sensor ends up measuring the temperature of the metal of the runner rather than the temperature of the air running through it. Especially at low engine speeds where the airflow past the sensor is low and the metallic heatsoak becomes the dominating factor. At idle on a warm day it gives intake air temperatures of around 70 degrees. This means that the air temperature adjustment becomes pretty haywire, particularly at part-throttle and low-load situations. The Exige S1 carbon airbox already had a port in it that was blanked off with a rubber bung. So that we wouldn't have to drill or cut anything we installed a new sensor here, which is measuring the intake air temp flow with a lot less heatsoak issues. To answer Eric's question, I'm not sure if the same hole exists on the Sport 190 airbox so one might need to be cut, but either way it's a convenient place to mount the sensor that works better than the stock location. Job's a carrot Today's work includes finishing work on the new battery bracket, and getting a load together for the anodisers to start on tomorrow. I'll also swing by and see the car again to analyse the weeping seal and to find out when it'll all be back in the car so I can organise a transporter to get the thing back in my garage as I've got a LOT to get busy with.

Yeah, it's a pisser having a car that starts, runs, makes all the right noises and just needs my hours on it to bolt everything back on and fabricate a few more things before I'm ready to hit the WOF station..... but it's sitting in a shop across town, gathering more dust and bird shit :( Mega pissed.

Went out and saw the car today.... sadly Ken's not had a chance to get to it yet and it won't be looked at until late in the week sadly... this is a right royal pain in the ass since I'll not have the car back here this weekend and I desperately need to get a bunch of stuff done on it.... still, in the meantime I'm doing all I can do on the rest of the car and have now got the rear clam more or less finished. Tonight the fog and reversing lights were cleaned up and put back in: The clam was then finished off with the freshly-cleaned grilles to add the final flourish: Now it's just a waiting game until I can get the damned car back here. I'm hoping to have it all but finished by the end of the month... I think the only thing I'll be waiting for at that stage will be a rear heat shield I'll need to have made up before the rear clam goes back on for good. Fingers crossed.

Well no progress on the actual car this weekend as Ken's only back to work tomorrow... hope to have the car back at mine by next weekend. I did however begin to so some work on the one remaining bit of the car that's still here; the rear clamshell. First job today was to replace the two RHS rear lights. These were stress cracked when I got the car and the first thing I actually bought for the car when I got it was replacements.... fitting them has been a LONG time coming. The next job was one I was dreading... opening up the rear vents in the clamshell where the fog and reversing lights are. Previously these had holes drilled in them for partial ventilation but I was after a bit more to try to keep the engine bay temps down a bit. Here's what they were like before I started: Now, I wanted to keep the fog and reversing lights (many people bin them), so I couldn't hack the whole vent box away. I wanted to leave enough fibreglass there to allow them to mount back in situ while improving airflow. A stiff whisky to steady the hand and then the dremel came out. I'm actually rather chuffed with the results! The rear clam also got a wash-up today to get all the accumulated grime off.... tomorrow I'll get to work reinstalling the fog/reversing lights again and the grilles and cleaning up another few little bits on it so that it's ready for the rest of the car when it returns.

Well we're back on deck for the new year and HOPEFULLY this one will be slightly more successful than the last at actually being able to finish this thing! The car spent Christmas in at KW and the engine will be pulled next week and the errant oil seal replaced. This shouldn't be a major job other than the hassle of draining/disconnecting the engine and transmission and refilling/bleeding everything thereafter. The one thing that has gone on over Christmas is that I've bought the car a new starter motor. The original starter motor is about the only thing in the engine bay I've not pulled off and cleaned up. It was a bit of an eyesore to me as it dragged the engine bay down a bit. Several people who saw the car commented on the starter not really being up to the standard of the rest of the engine so I was going to pull it off and clean it up. However, with the voltage-drop problems we've been having with the car, I decided to look around for a gear-reduction starter. This would allow the car to crank nice and fast but with less current-draw than the original starter, making it easier on the battery and wiring. I ordered a powerlite starter from the UK, which has the added benefit of being almost a kilo lighter than the OEM starter motor... so that's another benefit! Hopefully this'll arrive in the next week or so and will be bolted on and wired up before I need to crank the car over again. Nothing will really be happening this week as I'm waiting for my car to get to the head of the queue at KW.... so hopefully by this time next week we'll have some more progress to report and I'll be able to get the car back in my garage so that I can get to work shortening the "to-do before the road" list.

Nothing much new to report. The car will probably remain pretty-much as is for the next week or so until there's some time to pull the engine and replace the faulty oil seal. We'll just have to try again with it and hope that the next one isn't bung as well! As an aside, I was out that way today and am stuck driving my father's Elise at the moment (he's got my GTi6, and I've got his Elise up here having its windscreen replaced) and I figured that I've not yet taken a photo of the two of them together. I'm sure many many more photos will follow in the future, but for now, these are all I've got..... can't wait to get it finished now!!!!!

And as promised, here's some video of it on the dyno. These runs are through to only 6000RPM. The car sounds pretty tame with the exhaust ducted away like that.... suffice to say that it sounds a LOT more raucous with the exhaust sounding like it should! That's all for the car before Christmas. Hopefully we'll find out a bit more about the oil leak between Christmas and new year.... that's really the only fly in my ointment right now.... not happy!

Yeah that's me. I was following behind in a yellow Elise... Glenn was driving the tow vehicle

Spent today on the dyno getting the engine initially broken in under load and base-mapped up to about 6500 RPM. Obviously things are still conservative and it's not been done with the intention of getting max power out of it, but the engine ran very sweetly and sounded nice and angry! It's producing almost 190bhp at the hubs at 7000 (as far as we went) which must be somewhere around 200bhp at the flywheel. The power curve is still very steep at this point and we've still got at least 1500RPM to go. Combine this with the fact that the engine is still tight and it was well over 30 degrees here today, we're looking well on target for my rough goal of 220+bhp I also drove it today for the first time since Easter '08... ok so it was only 30m down the road but even so it feels so responsive and sharp compared to dad's car. The car's now tucked up at KW until the new year as Ken is going to pull the engine and get to the bottom of the weeping crank seal for me. It's only a very small leak but better to get on top of it now before it buggers the clutch and makes too much of a mess. Dyno video to follow tomorrow when I've been home

Yeah, I just hope it's not a sign of things to come. Apparently it's down to a faulty batch of crank seals... but instead of recalling them they just let customers install them and find out for themselves... no wonder the British motor industry doesn't exist any more.

Merde! Well a good and bad day today.... I've just had a call from Glenn and the car's all on the dyno. Some preliminary mapping work has been done and it's looking all as it should... the engine is a cammy wee bastard and it just won't take any fuel up until about 3500RPM up until which point the thing just gulps it in.... it's definitely going to be a screamer! The bad news is that the car seems to be leaking oil out of the rear main crank seal. Nothing major but enough to mean that the gearbox has to come off to sort out. Because I'm running the 6-speed Quaife box, this means the whole engine needs to come out..... FUCK! Not really the news I'd been hoping for, but I guess in the end of it, if that's the worst to come from it, then it's not the end of the world. I know that others who have built VHPD engines lately (I'm thinking Clive AKA MrBean) have also had trouble with the rear mainseals as supplied in the Rover seal kits, which leads me to believe the seal design is flawed. I seem to remember someone mentioning that there was a better seal out there, so I'mma see if I can't find out more about that in the next day or two. Off to Glenn's in the morning and we should be in a position to tow the car away by lunchtime all going well *touches wood*. I'm going to talk to Ken in the morning and see if he's got a spot there to take my car as I don't really want to trailer it back to mine, only to trailer it back to KW at a later date. I'd rather Ken did it as I'm sure he could do it with his eyes closed, and I'm REALLY not in the mood to go pulling my own engine out in a cramped garage at this stage of the game. GRRRRR

Another minor update. I've got the Odyssey battery and have redesigned the battery clamp. This has been sent off to manufacture and I'll have it mid-January after the Christmas shut-down. The IAT sensor has been moved to the back of the carbon airbox and gives sensible readings, which will help things immensely. She's been given her first oil change to ensure any assembly nasties aren't floating around in the oil. Glenn has been doing some work on getting the cold-start right on the engine and we've now got about 20-25 minutes time up on the engine. With the coolant system under pressure we've uncovered a couple of small leaks. Just hose clamps that weren't nipped up tight enough. It seems to be holding now, but we'll check again with the engine hot and under load. Tomorrow I head up to GDS with the new battery and we bolt the car to the dyno and spend the day running the engine and getting the mapping done below about 5000RPM. This is the state the car will be in for the run-in period of the first 800km or so... it should be just about coming up on cam at that point so it'll be interesting to drive with the fun police stepping in just as things begin to get interesting! Looking forward to having the car back in the garage and attacking the remaining jobs in the new year! Oh and in other news, I've been putting together a valuation for replacement costs for insurance purposes..... the replacement value for this car has now reached utterly comical proportions!

Sadly none of the off the shelf brackets suit, unless I want to drill holes through the chassis... something I'll avoid. My existing design will work, just needs tweaking and remanufacture

A small update today. In the process of getting things running last night we discovered a couple of small issues. First off, the small battery I've got in the car (the same one I used to great effect in my old Elise) isn't man enough for the job here. Even when fully charged, the voltage drop-off during cranking is too much for the ignition system. This was fine for whatever reason on the Elise, but the Exige is a bit more critical. The upshot is that I'm going to move to a nearly identical battery, but an Odyssey race battery. It's the same capacity but has a much better crank rating than the Synergy AGM battery I had before. Weight goes up from 5kg to just under 7kg, but at least it'll work and work well. The other pisser is that this'll need a new bracket since the bracket I designed for the Synergy AGM battery is specific to that battery. The bonus (for my father at least) is that I'll transplant the synergy battery and bracket into his car, replacing the behemoth 14kg battery that's in there currently. The new battery is on order and we'll have it in the car over the weekend. It'll just get wedged in for now and I'll design up the bracket and get that made in early January..... a real pain in the arse, but you get that on the big jobs. The other small issue that arose is we found that the IAT (intake air temperature) sensor on the VHPD is next to useless. It's located in the intake runner for #4 cylinder and it suffers from very bad heatsoak from the metal in the inlet manifold. It's reading intake temps of 60-70 degrees when in reality they're more like 25-30. We've disconnected it and we're running a second IAT sensor in the blanked hole that's already in the carbon intake box. This will give much better readings and allow much better trimming and air temp compensation... something that would have been near impossible with the stock sensor. Off home for an early night tonight... knackered after last night's efforts!

Thanks guys, it's been a long road! There's still a way to go... some small electrical/engine management niggles to get on top of (nothing major) before we get it on the dyno next week. Hopefully I can have it back in my garage by Christmas. After I get back in early January, I'll be designing/making up some new heatshields for the rear, which has to happen before I bolt the rest of the bodyshell back on, and setting the suspension up. Once that's done, it's time to get a wof/reg and then off to do some run-in. Hoping to have it actually on the road towards the end of Jan.

Thanks And yeah I'm definitely a bit "proud dad" this morning!

With the exhaust system fitted, we could get some sensible readings out of the lambda sensor and begin to start mapping idle and tweaking things. The car also sounds a lot better with the exhaust fitted..... but still nicely grumpy! During this time, the coolant system managed to bleed itself through (after I'd bled it as much as possible on the starter). It's not drinking any more coolant and the temps are very stable at 82-84 degrees. Fans cut in and out as they should. Oil pressure is good and oil level is spot on. The engine sounds great, cranks freely with no undue noises or warning signs, which is VERY pleasing, and a great relief! After a couple of small sessions like this, we called it a night. We've got about 16 minutes of engine running under our belts, so the cams should be nice and bedded in. Will sort out tomorrow exactly when we can get the car onto the dyno to get the base-mapping done under load