Esprit

Today's work involved machining up this small manifold to allow me to mount the oil pressure switch (dash warning light) and the oil pressure gauge sender (SPADesign) remotely from the engine. This will avoid damage to the pressure sensor that would be caused by vibration if it was direct-mounted. Here you can see the gauge pressure sensor (1/8"BSPP thread) on the left and the OEM pressure switch (1/8" NPT thread) on the right. The port in the middle is a 1/8" NPT port that will have an NPT-AN/JIS adaptor screwed in. I'll then run a -3AN/JIS line from the existing oil pressure takeoff to wherever I end up mounting this setup. The temperature probes will be direct mounted to the engine as these need to be in the oil flow and aren't susceptible to vibration.

I think the oil aerates too much if it's filled to level if used at high RPM. I imagine the resultant would be oil out the breather, yes.... I'm just going on the advice from Quaife, and I guess they know their boxes better than I do I'll have a look around and see if I can find a vernier cable tie

Hehe yeah, I'm thinking a cable-tie through the hole with a bend in it will be sufficient

Well it's a weekend again so more work to be done on the car. Sitting in the office working right now and trying to figure out a way of fitting the engine oil pressure sender.... it's proving to be a bit of a head-scratcher right now but I'm sure I'll figure out a way at the end. Might machine up a tee-piece to allow me to fit the BSP thread of the oil pressure sender along with the NPT thread of the oil pressure switch for the stack. More sensors will be going in this weekend (engine oil temp aftercooler, engine oil temp sump, gearbox oil temp). Will also have a go at fitting up the engine air filter. Will also get some gearbox oil into the box as this arrived today: $200 worth of sweet Motul FF-LSD gear oil. Will have to make up some kind of dip-stick because Quaife have advised that for high RPM applications it's beneficial to run the gearbox oil about 10mm lower than the level plug. Will have to get inventive and try to measure this somehow. Also want to get working on finalising the ECU mount. The time is rapidly approaching when the car will leave me for another workshop... there it'll get the wiring and initial dyno/tuning work done....... shit should start to happen quite quickly from then on! Should keep me out of mischief for the weekend anyway.

Well today I've been ordering lubricants. I've got some Valvoline non-friction-modified run-in oil on order for the engine as well as some Motul FF-LSD Synthetic gear oil for the gearbox. The run-in oil will be used for the first few hundred miles of engine operation, before doing a second flush-through oil change (with some Castrol GTX before it moves to its final Motul 300V competition oil. It'll get run-in and basemapped on the run-in oil and will only be stressed on the dyno once it's got the good stuff inside. As for the rest of the evening this evening, I've been downstairs on the lathe again, turning my gearbox drain plug into a thermo-probe adaptor: Tomorrow if I can get some garage-time, I'll be looking into the plumbing for the engine oil pressure switch (OEM existing), engine temperature sensors (Sump and post-cooler) and the engine oil pressure sensor. I want to find a way of remotely mounting this pressure sensor so as to isolate it from the engine vibrations. I may have to get someone to make me up a short run of hose for this (think something similar to a brake flexi hose). We'll see

Well I FINALLY managed to get the gearbox cooler setup all finished (excluding wiring of course). It took way longer than I'd thought it would but the install has ended up really tidy, even better than most OEM cooler setups I've seen. The photo below shows the pump mounted in the middle taking its feed from the gearbox takeoff and pumping oil to the Laminova cooler From here, it then exits the cooler and feeds oil back into the top of the gearbox as seen in the photo below (copied from a previous blog entry): Next task is to machine up the gearbox drain plug to take an oil temperature sensor, then fit the oil filter and fill the engine and box with oil! I'll probably try to actually manually pump some oil under pressure into the galleries first and also back-fill the oil pump under pressure to allow it to prime and begin picking oil from the sump. It'll then get cranked without plugs (or fuel obviously) to hopefully get oil circulating through the engine. This will then be cranked every week or so just to make sure that everything is well oiled by the time it comes to actually fire it up for the first time. Now to think about the wiring!

Think it was like $150? Chump change in the scheme of things here.... need to find bigger sheets of the stuff so I can re-do my rear heatshield which is massive.

Another busy weekend this weekend just chomping into the million and one little tasks I've got left to do on the car. One of these that I tackled was to pull the oilstat off and the oil lines ready for their final fitment. This infolved a little fettling of the bracket I made to remove a sharp corner near where one of the lines ran and then sleeving the oil hoses where they run near the chassis (or anything else they can potentially rub on). I used the sleeving I pulled off the original lines. Today's job was to finish off the manifold heatshield I'd started some months ago. Here's the old, original heatshield that had self-disintegrated to a large extent: And here's the completed new one I made up, all folded and riveted (with Bulbtites) together into shape: I worked pretty hard to get the new one as close as possible to the shape of the old one as it's a very tight squeeze in there! In the end I had to re-make the two small alloy L-brackets at the bottom a little longer to give the shield a little clearance to the coolant rail (the old shield touched this)..... but in the end it fits like the proverbial glove! Very happy. I wanted to fit the alternator/cambelt heatshield too but sometime during the rebuild process one of the brackets for this has gone missing and I think it's probably still at KW. I'll call by Ken this week and see if it's kicking around there... else I'll order another from Lotus or make my own if I have to. Even small progress is good progress

Yeah it's a lot of fun... as evidenced by this photo here: The GTR wasn't getting that far away from me in this shot, although it was streaming with rain and he was on worn semis. Buy a good one and they're pretty reliable... they don't tolerate being neglected though and many of them have been run into the ground.... so drive a few and get to know the feeling between a good one and a bad one. Mine when bought was a low-mileage minter (minus some vandalism damage on the roof) and has been eminently reliable since. I've had a couple of small electrical niggles, one of which was just a loose contact, the other was fixed by stripping down the indicator stalk and cleaning it. The only other thing to complain about is a couple of boot struts that are a bit weak and need replacing. Always happy to give my opinion on a car if you're looking at getting one... if you're around Auckland you're welcome to come by and take mine for a spin to see if you like it.

Assuming you mean 306 GTi6. Well I reckon it's the performance equivalent of a Civic Type R.... the Integra R is probably a touch quicker on track.... but there's very little in it. I've had it on track a few times and for a "boring" car, and a reliable daily driver it's actually really good.... not the fastest thing out there (although can surprise a few things if driven right) but plenty of fun to be had in it with that lively rear end! Around town it's very docile with its high gearing and on the open road it's very comfortable and far more refined than a Jap hot hatch. The #1 bonus is that they're a very anonymous car... other road users won't look at you like a boyracer and I still really like the look of them (they look much fresher than most '90s hatches).... best of all is that they're completely unknown amongst the boyracer set, which means they're also completely unknown by the criminal fraternity.... I can leave the GTi6 parked out on the street overnight and be reasonably sure it'll be there in the morning.... with a Honda R, there's a 50/50 chance it won't be there when I wake up.

Well a very fruitful Tuesday night working on the car. Went back into work after the gym and measured a bunch of stuff up. Turns out the Metric/DIN M14x1.5 adaptors you can buy off the shelf run a 30 degree female taper. From measuring the flare fitting on the Lotus OEM fuel filter outlet it looked very much like 45 degrees, which backs up my research. This meant that even if the fuel fitting had been long enough the incompatible tapers would have resulted in a lousy seal. So 15 minutes on SolidWorks and 45 minutes on the lathe downstairs and I turned myself up an adaptor: This has the right tapers on each end to mate the Goodridge fitting and the Exige fuel filter taper on the other.... it pinches up nice and tight suggesting the tapers are spot on... the proof will be when I raise fuel pressure, but for now I think we'll call that one done Here's the fuel pressure sensor setup all fitted (apologies for the blurry pic).... Job doneski!

Well this weekend's been a little disrupted, but I've still found a bit of time to get into the garage and do some more work on the car. First little job was to source some clamps to allow me to mount the gearbox cooler pump. These have had to be ordered from Oz and will hopefully be here during next week. This is preventing me from finishing the routing on this. The bit I CAN finish though, is the oil return line from the cooler to the gearbox. An hour in the garage making up the line today and I've got it installed. Central in the picture you can see it running from the cooler near the firewall up to the top of the gearbox. There's just enough of a loop there to allow for engine movement without the line rubbing on anything. The other job I'm starting is thinking about air filtration.... this is a bit of a long story. The airbox can be seen below. It's a carbon-fibre box that sits over the trumpets and bolts to the trumpet backplate. The flexible trunking then runs over to the left hand side-duct on the car. In the mouth of the trunking, is an air filter, commonly referred to as a "witch's tit", since it's a flat-conical shaped cone filter resembling a cross between a witch's hat and some prominent female chestular topography. Some Exiges have two of these (one at the trunking mouth, the other at the junction between the trunking and the airbox.... although this is more about quietening down induction noise rather than filtration. Mine had just the one. The filter can be seen in place at the end of the trunking here: Given the small area of this filter, and its position right in the duct, it's fairly restrictive and becomes damaged / clogged easily by road debris. The general accepted solution is to run a sausage-style filter inside the airbox itself where the area is large and the air velocity is low. ITG make Lotus specific filters, but they're very much not cheap. They come with their own filter back-plates, which clamp to the filter (sandwiching the airbox, instead of bolting to it). Clive (Mr Bean from SELOC/Exiges.com) posted up an interesting mod he did on his ITG filter whereby he was able to adapt his ITG filter to run on the OEM backplate. He also had a spare filter I bought off him as I intended to do the same modification. This is where things get tricky. There are two ITG Lotus kits. One is the original Lotus Sport kit (LKP100700). This was originally developed for the Lotus Sport 190 kit. Then later on, ITG also did a "LC74" version of their "Megaflow" filter which was more specifically for the Exige. I thought these two were the same, but they're not quite. The one that Clive used and the one I got was an LKP100700, and when it arrived, I had my doubts. It's more of a wedge-shaped filter than the photos suggest, especially at the ends and I felt that the filter runs a little too close to the #1 and #4 trumpet and could disrupt the airflow somewhat. I bit the bullet and also ordered a JC74 kit. This means I ended up with two filter assemblies, but this allows me to examine the differences. The photos below show both side by side. The LKP100700 is the slightly shallower, more tapered filter with the silver backplate and the JC74 is the more domed filter with the red backplate: As you can see, the JC74 has a lot more clearance around the end trumpets. It also does away with the 1/4-turn dzus fasteners of the LKP in favour of M6 screws and rivnuts. This made the choice easy since the JC74-s clearly the better filter for the application of the two. The difference comes about due to the Sport 190 Elise's shallower airbox I think. The only problem is that the construction of the JC74 means that Clive's modification to use the stock backplate won't work, which means the custom alloy backplate I made up might have to be rejected. The reason for not using the ITG-supplied backplate is that the filter fasteners supposedly end up in a really inaccessible position... which I'll have to try sometime this week with a test fitting. Either way there's going to have to be some small modification made somewhere to make everything fit as it should... will require a little more thought, but I'm sure that I'll be able to find a workable solution.... I always do.

Hahah love the sig... Well ideally, knock sensors should go as close to the cylinder wall as possible as this will be the most direct path from the detonation to the sensor. Ideally further up the block the better (nearer the combustion chamber). I'm going to be picking up on an existing block tapping about halfway down the block near cylinder #1, which isn't entirely optimal, but more than good enough. It's also away from other things (exhaust and ignition) which could hurt longevity and accuracy so short of welding a boss on the block or tapping the engine casting (not really a go on the RoverK since it's paper thin anyway), so it's about as good as I'm gonna get.

Haha yeah, I guess it's a bit of an ironic quote. And yeah, I've tried to retain original things where possible and where not (such as the gearbox), I've made sure the improvements are pure bolt-ins with no modifications required to reverse them. In some ways this rebuild is a bit of a compromise... I'm increasing the performance as much as I dare and modifying a few things to improve the car for how I want to use it, but I'm doing everything with a nod to originality, not replacing any of the actual Lotus bits.... shame is it ends up being really expensive to do it this way and ends up not being as quick as it would have been had I just said "f**k it" and thrown a supercharged K20 Honda engine in the back of it. As I like to think of it, this is the car that Lotus would have given me had I bought the car brand new in 2001, taken it straight next door to Lotus Sport, given them a huge fistful of dollars and told them to build me the ultimate expression of the Exige... it embodies the best of everything given the direction Lotus were heading at that time.... and to me that's my ideal spec, even if it's not empirically the best. As for the sensors, I'm pretty sure I can calibrate the Link to read all the factory sensors, nothing in the documentation suggests that it'll be a problem. Given that I've heard that the Emerald ECUs which are practically plug-and-play use very similar architecture to the Link G3, I'm thinking it won't be a problem. Extra sensors will be added (knock, Wideband O2, extra temp / pressure sensors etc) and these have all been specced so as to work with the Link.

The Link Looms will come out of the RHS of the box loop around and into the RHS of the Link. Obviously the OEM loom connects to the adaptor box at the top. The new wiring (for additional non-Lotus sensors and gear will come out of the Left hand side of the adaptor box and will terminate inside the box itself. I've certainly added some weight to the car with the following items: 6-speed box (about 3kg heavier) Oil thermostat (350g) Gearbox oil cooler + Pump (1kg) Extra bracketry for ecu, oil thermostat etc (1kg total). New Gauges (250g) New wiring (500g) Engine Assembly +1kg (heavier crankshaft, lighter flywheel, lighter backplate for air filter, heavier oil filter) Total gain (estimated) = 6100g = 7.1kg Weight Savings: Lightweight battery (new battery 5kg, old one 13kg) = 8kg New design undertrays = 1kg lighter Removal of brake splash shields = 200g (unsprung) Use of lighter oil hose / unions in cooler circuit = 100g Miscellaneous savings (removal of emissions control solenoids, miscellaneous bracketry = 200g Lighter engine mounts = 1.5kg lighter Total Savings (estimated) = 11.0kg Overall weight difference = 3.9kg lighter. Of course this doesn't take into account the probably 5kg of stones/gravel/crud I've cleaned out of the chassis and body cavities. Overall it'll be about the same weight as before. I've not really started to look at saving weight yet. I've plans to do some further mods down the track to get some more weight out of it (autoclaved carbon roof, autoclaved carbon front cover, forged wheels, aluminium fuel tank etc which should combined shave maybe 25-30kg off the kerb weight) but I won't be going to extremes with this car.... so much with the lightening on these cars involves hacking things about... this one is about remaining original or at least easily reversible to original should I choose to do so. The next Lotus I build will take a no-holds-barred approach to weight and power with zero consideration for originality or correctness.

Plagiarise away! If I can trigger an idea in someone to do something on their own car then this build thread has served it's purpose

Couple of days off work at the moment struck down with a midwinter virus. With 7 guys crammed into a small office and with half of them coughing their lungs up for the last month it was only a matter of time until I got it. Been spending most of my time resting, but today started another little job on the to-do list.... the mounting of the ECU. Now you may or may not recall that I'm bucking the accepted path of running the K on an Emerald and am trying the latest Link G4 Xtreme. This was chosen for its excellent capability for the money (it's one of the best ECUs I could find on the market at the moment, does most of what a high-end MoTeC does, at a quarter the price) and also since it's a NZ product there's more local support and tuning knowledge. I've also begun to make up a loom adaptor box. This will allow me to connect the Exige Loom to the new ECU without cutting a single wire, the ECU installation will be 100% reversible. Any new wires run will be run into the adaptor box itself, and seamlessly integrated with the existing wiring. The shell and connector for this has been fabricated, but that's all at this stage: The task was now to see if I could fit this into the space taken up by the original VHPD ECU behind the passenger seat, on the bulkhead: The small black box stuck to the front of the ECU is the microwave sensor for the alarm. I modelled up the existing ECU in SolidWorks as well as the adaptor box, LINK ECU and the LINK ECU Mount. I was then able to play around with the positioning to get the loom plug in the right position. Given that there's not a lot of leeway with the large connector on the Exige loom, this really becomes the datum position for the new assembly. The final assembly will look something like this: This can be seen with the silhouette of the original ECU superimposed in transparent red: This is all mounted on a lasercut alloy bracket that'll look something like this: This will enable me to pick up on the original mounts for the Lotus ECU in the bulkhead, no drilling or extra fixings necessary. I've still a bit more work to do on the mount plate as I'll cut a bunch more metal out of it (add lightness!) but that's the basic shape with the necessary pick-up points. As you can see, the new setup will sit a little deeper than the original ECU. This is no problem as there's a chunk of space there (as indicated by the fact that the alarm sensor sits atop the ECU at present. I'll probably have to stick this elsewhere but there's plenty of space for this in isolation. The new arrangement should fit neatly and very snugly (2mm to spare!) in the gap left by the old ECU... it'll look like 'twas made to be there! Will get this cut in the next fortnight and test-mount it in place so that it's in-situ by the time the wiring needs to begin.

Frustratingly little was done over the weekend on SEXIGE because the bits I was hoping to turn up from Blighty on Friday only arrived this morning (Monday). Still, I've been out in the garage tonight tinkering and have taken a step forward.... and then a step backwards The step backwards is in the area of the fuel pressure sender takeoff. The picture below shows my proposed setup all mocked up next to the Lotus OEM piece: Now, you'll see from comparing the two that the M14 fitting on the end (brass fitting on the Lotus OEM bit, Anodised blue fitting on the new bit) the lengths of them are different. On the OEM fitting, the brass flare nut pulls the tapered tube flare up onto a tapered seat in the fuel filter housing. Because it's shorter on the new piece, the thread bottoms out on the hex before the tapered end of the fitting gets near the tapered seat in the filter. F**K. Now, I could turn the hex right off the fitting altogether but I think the black hex of the next fitting in the line would almost foul too. I'm now left either looking at achieving this differently with another fitting, making up my own custom male-to-male fitting (expensive) or modifying the fuel filter itself by sticking it in a lathe and turning the end of the filter's female boss down. The last one is certainly the easiest for me, a ten minute job in my lunchbreak tomorrow.... but it means I'll have to modify the fuel filter every time I change it out for a new one... not quite as tidy as I'd like. Still, I don't need to get fuel flowing through it tomorrow so there's no immediate hurry so I'll investigate it a bit further. It's just annoying because it's another thing I can't tick off the list. I then set about working out where to position the new gearbox cooler pump. After running some test lines to test bend radii, fitting choices etc, I've settled on mounting it just above the left hand lower wishbone mount on the chassis (that's the front eye of the left hand lower rear wishbone). Seen roughly in position here: This is a really nice position for it since it keeps the pump low (good for priming), keeps the runs short, yet allows for a good flexibility when the engine moves about on its mounts. It's also going to be reasonably easy to pick up on one of the wishbone mount-to-chassis bolts with a norma clamp or similar. I can make something up out of lasercut alloy if needs be. So much tidier and more elegant than the giant Mocal pump anyway. Either way, very little accomplished for quite a bit of time and expense... frustrating... especially with spring just around the corner

Haha, no I'll probably clean it periodically... They don't get that dirty usually anyway... Just another by-product of the UK's wonderful corrosive roads!

A clean chassis is a happy chassis! But by Christ what a horrible job, took ages and now I ache! Definitely the sort of job I'm glad is out of the way

Oh it's a non-negotiable it will be finished before summer. This is the third winter I've worked through on it, it was meant to be ready for the first summer, missed that thanks to rebuilding the engine... then just doing too much on the car resulted in it missing the second summer too.... it WON'T miss the third. Got to push hard now, but hoping to be able to get the engine started and running in September.

Right, well another sunny winter's day in the garage! I'm currently waiting for some stuff to turn up from Blighty to allow me to finish the plumbing, so today I tackled another one of those tasks I've been putting off for a while..... cleaning the underfloor! I'd previously (about 18 months ago!) cleaned up the underfloor beneath the battery/heater compartment up front. I did this when cleaning up around the front crash structure. I've also got new engine front and rear undertrays ready to bolt on when the car's mobile again, so these parts of the underside will look shiny and new again. Today I set about cleaning up the bit in the middle as well as beneath the sills. This was all coated with 9 years (ok, the car's only really been actually on the road for about 4) of road grime, scuffs and a little bit of spot-corrosion on the aluminium where stone / gravel impacts have gone through the anodising. This is all natural wear and tear type stuff but could easily be cleaned back to near-new condition, whereby it can be periodically cleaned and protected by application of ACF50. First was cleaning all the grime off the undersills. Here's a dirty one, as seen beneath the oil thermostat I recently installed: And here's a clean one I've prepared earlier.... much better: That was the easy part, the hard part was cleaning up the large expanse of aluminium underfloor. In the end, some alkalai wash to remove as much dirt as possible, some CRC to help degrease and a large amount of Autosol to buff the accumulated crud off was used. All this required a LOT of elbow grease! I managed to get about halfway through before I ran out of Autosol, so guess what I'm doing tomorrow after a quick trip down to Repco to get some more?!?! The following pics show the current state of the underfloor, with the cleaned section being closer to the camera and the still dirty section furthest away. Mmmmm clean

Well it's been a lovely weekend here weather-wise. Bracing, yet sunny... which signals that winter's past the halfway point and reminds me that spring is just around the corner. Spurred on by this, I've had a busy week with the car... only a little progress but many hours have been spent. First thing I've done is junked last week's idea of mounting the fuel pressure takeoff on the fuel rail. On advice that pressure sensors don't generally like vibration, it was a safer bet to mount this sensor back on the chassis. The most logical place to do this is on the downstream side of the fuel filter (item 7 in the following image): Now, this proved a little hard since the fitting involved was a M14 x 1.5 concave flare fitting, which isn't the most common. I could convert from it to -JIC/-AN easily enough, but then converting back to M14 concave flare thereafter to match up with the OEM tubing was proving a nightmare to sort out. Thankfully, the guys at Russell fittings in the US have just the trick as they sell -AN to SAE push-fit fitting adaptors meaning that instead of inserting something between the fuel filter and item #7 in the above image, I could simply make up a piece to replace item #7 altogether. One quick e-mail to the wonderful guys Jegs High Performance (www.jegs.com) in the states, and a few days later, I had the setup sitting on my desk at work: This will enable me to mount a pressure sensor (1/8" NPT) into the fuel line and datalog what the fuel pressure is doing within the Link G4. The above setup still requires a male/male M14 x 1.5 to -6JIC adaptor, but that's coming next week along with a big bunch of fittings I'm getting from Merlin Motorsport in the UK (www.merlinmotorsport.co.uk). From here is coming my new gearbox cooler pump, fuel pressure sensor and all the hose and fittings I should need to finish most of the car off. Much of this weekend has been spent generating this shopping list of fittings and figuring out where everything's going to go. Also I've been doing a bit more work on the plug for the dashboard gauge pod. This is now ready for final priming and sanding and will get a topcoat and waxing prior to me taking moulds off it. Once all my fittings and hose arrives, I'll be able to get the engine and box all sealed up. Then the wiring begins! Oh and one other job is that I've managed to relocate the reverse light switch from the PG1 box across to the Quaife box... hopefully it works.

Yes yes, I know, I've been slack lately on the Exige but at the moment things have been a little disrupted with family stuff and the girlfriend suffering through some family turmoil of her own. Dutifully I've been stealing an hour here and there to do some work on the car, although there's SFA to actually show for it as it's mainly organisational stuff. I've almost finalised a list of hose, fittings, pump etc to get from Merlin Motorsports to allow me to finish plumbing up the oil-side of the gearbox cooler. I've also begun to plan out where the various sensors are going to go on the engine and how I'm going to route some of the wiring. Obviously there's not a lot I can show you here, some papers with measurements and thread sizes on it is all I've got to show for several hours work... frustrating but essential nonetheless. A little sub project I've been working on this weekend though is a little take-off adaptor I plan to bolt in between the fuel supply line (after the filter) and the fuel rail. I spent this week searching for longer screws (2-start special thermoplastic tapping screws) to no avail so I had to change the design from my initial plan just a bit to use the existing screws. This adaptor will allow me to fit a fuel pressure sensor into the system, which will then be datalogged by the ECU. This is because the stock Lotus fuel pump will be running pretty close to its limit with the sort of power I'll be making. I could run a larger capacity aftermarket pump, but since the stock pump is a submersible 2-stage pump and the only available substitutes are single-stage (with their associated fuel starvation issues) there's no easy upgrade. If I did want to upgrade, I'd have to make up a surge tank and run two pumps (lift and pressure). By datalogging the fuel pressure, I can see if the stock pump is handling the increased load and I should be able to programme into the ECU a safe-mode ("limp-home") to save the engine from potentially leaning out if fuel pressure begins to drop away. Of course I'll also be logging Wideband O2 as well, but this will be a belt-and braces type solution which will keep me informed as to whether the stock Lotus pump is being overwhelmed or not. Here you can see the take-off I've designed in SolidWorks: It'll be milled from billet Ally and anodised black. It'll have a Viton O-ring inserted around the groove closest to the "camera" in the screengrab. This then bolts together as seen below. The yellow part is the fuel feed line from the fuel filter, with the block on the right being the boss on the end of the VHPD fuel rail. Once it's all together and anodised, it should look a little like this: Currently on the agenda is to get an order placed for the gearbox oil pump gubbins and also design up a gear-plate to allow me to mount the Link G4 Xtreme ECU and my little homebuilt adaptor box all neatly on the firewall using the mounting studs that Lotus put there for the stock VHPD ECU. This'll just prevent me having to drill any extra holes and will make on-bench preassembly a little easier when it comes time to bolt it all in. Tally Ho!

It's about £160 plus freight so not cheap, but pretty similarly priced to alternatives