Esprit

CO2 extinguisher in this case so non corrosive. As for storage, we'll see what happens with the househunt in the next little while.

Meh, I've spent all the money on all the right parts, done everything to the highest standard I can manage but this car is suicidal. I guess sometimes you buy a lemon, and I bought the biggest of them all.

And this is where my project comes to a rather ignoble end. Friday saw the car head up to the dyno, for her final tune and power runs. For the back-to-back comparisons we were just doing power runs to 8000RPM when disaster struck. As near as we can tell, the oil filter either worked loose, extruded a seal or stripped a thread. Hot oil was sprayed all over the exhaust manifold, which instantly ignited into a huge fireball, which consumed the rear half of the car. Glenn managed to immediately shut the engine down and extricate himself from the inferno, while I made a mad dash for the extinguisher. Between my efforts with the extinguisher and Glenn on the hose, we managed to extinguish it after what seemed like a very long time (but was probably only about 10-15 seconds). I've not inspected it in detail yet, but the damage seems pretty minor with the body and chassis looking like it's escaped without permanent damage. The firewall bore the brunt of the fire and the heat shielding looks to have done its job here. This will all need replacing (for a fourth time). Datalogging shows that the car still had semi decent oil pressure of 30PSI when Glenn got off the throttle, 0.2 seconds after the initial blow off, and still had above 16psi when unloaded on decel. Oil pressure was still at 12psi when shut down so we think that the engine should have survived unscathed, hopefully at least. The rest of the car needs to come to bits to fix the fire damage, but I can't really be bothered. I'm currently out of room at my old place and don't have a garage I can work on the car any more. I'm looking to buy a house, which will take some time, so I'm unable to undertake another rebuild right now anyway. I'm thinking of throwing in the towel with it, part of me wishes it had just burned to the ground. Will probably tow it down to Hawke's Bay in a few weeks over Christmas, stick it out in the back paddock with a tarp over it and forget about it for a year or three. If I ever get my motivation back, I will see then. Until then I'm giving up on playing with cars and taking up a hobby that doesn't piss on me at every opportunity. I wish I could say it's been fun, but in reality it's not been anything other than expense and heartache.

Well, progress has been muted the last month or so. Changeable weather and a busy non-car schedule have largely kept me out of the garage and out from behind the wheel. The run-in is now complete, having done about 720 miles (1150km) of good running. I've got the Motul 300V Competition oil into her, a new filter and I've upped the rev limit to 8000 in prep for tomorrow's final tune dyno session. I've done a bit more reprogramming too, I've set the car up with a variable rev limit so that when the oil is below 45 degrees, the rev limit will kick in at 3500RPM, then up to 65 degrees the rev limit will cut in at 6500RPM. Above 65 degrees the full 8000 (eventually 8500RPM) will be available. I'm still chasing a couple of very small oil leaks, although these are just fittings that need a bit of nipping up, all the seals seem to be holding good this time around. I've only had the one chance to take it to above the old 6500RPM limit thus far, a quick squirt up to 7500RPM through 2nd and third gear and MY GOD it's quick! The speed at which it piles on revs is insane and I'm gonna have to spend some time programming the shift-lights to my liking once it's all finished to prevent me from head-butting the rev-limiter... above 6500RPM it just gains revs so fast it's like a motorbike... then when you change gear you don't drop out of the torque band like you do when changing at 6000/6500 and the acceleration is just vicious. I've also fabricated and fitted the breather tube for the gearbox, which means I can run it with more oil in it without it throwing it everywhere. It's just a stand-tube with a K&N breather filter on it, an interim measure until I get around to fabricating a dedicated twin-chamber catch tank next winter. I've just bought some spare blue Alcantara dash trim pieces off Paul Myhill (PMyhill to all you SELOCers) which will be here in a couple of weeks. I'll hack these about to finish up the dash along with a bit of custom carbon work, without having to hack about my original bits. This will then allow me to finish off fitting the Lifeline extinguisher system sometime after Christmas. So, with that, tomorrow I'm off to visit the dyno, to check that everything's still happy, and we'll also take it for a ~80km road tune to just check that we're happy with all the part-throttle mapping and hopefully if all goes well (unlike last time) it should make some semi-decent power and be a hell of a lot of fun to drive.... from there on out I'm well and truly onto the finishing bits and pieces. Also, on Sunday I'm hoping to take it out Hampton Downs and get it on the skid pad for a bit of gymkhana fun TALLY HO!

Just a quick update for early November. I've not been able to spend much time using the car or in the garage the past few weeks with one thing or another, but I've been plodding on. About 650 miles on the engine now, and I'm booked in to hit the dyno on Nov 25th to get the final tune done and on the car. Weekend after next I'll change the oil over to the Motul 300V Competition 20W-50 and slot a new filter in, ready for taking advantage of the RPM up above the 6500RPM limit I've currently got on it. I also have to get a breather pipe made up for the gearbox to help to stop the oil splash out when hot. That'll probably happen this weekend. One job I have been working on it a bit of a tweak to the way the gearbox cooler pump operates. Obviously, I've uncovered a weakness with the splash lubrication of the 5th/6th gearset. Thankfully the oil cooler return line returns oil back to the box over the top of this assembly, meaning that when the cooler is running, this weakness is negated. Because the MoTeC is controlling the cooler pump temperature switching, I've now got this triggering off an auxiliary table that polls both gearbox temperature and throttle percentage. When the gearbox oil is below 55 degrees, the pump is permanently off. 55 degrees is deemed to be the lowest sensible normal running temperature. Above 55 degrees, the pump will switch on when the throttle position is over 95%, meaning that when the gearbox is warm, the cooler will be circulating oil when the gearbox is at maximum load so long as the oil temp remains above 55 degrees (hence preventing overcooling). On track this will mean that the cooler will be running a significant amount of the time, keeping the 5th/6th gearset lubricated. The normal running temperature of the gearbox on the road is about 70 degrees when fully up to temperature. As such, when the temperature exceeds 80 degrees the pump will activate regardless of throttle position, hence cooling the oil at maximum capacity. This is a really cool benefit of having the MoTeC controlling this kinda thing. I'd never intended it to work in this way, but after 10 minutes at the laptop I've been able to reconfigure it to work sensibly the way I want it without hacking into wiring or cutting metal to mount more sensors. It's times like these when spending money during the build pays dividends!

Need to sort out that crooked R/H headlight Heath!

A successful day in the garage today. First off I got the coolant system re-bled as I don't think I got all the air out the first time around. There was a cool spot in one corner of the radiator when the car was hot indicating that some air was still trapped in there. I managed to get a few bubbles out the radiator bleed point and now the radiator feels hot all over. I might try to re-bleed it in another week or two just to make sure all the air is out. The next job was to get all the extinguisher lines run in the engine bay and the nozzles mounted. I managed to get all this done and I'm really happy with how it's come out. All the lines are completely hidden from sight and securely mounted. The nozzles themselves are quite discreet too despite being purple! Here you can see the four of them in the corners of the engine bay: I've still got to figure out where to mount the remote charge cannister for the extinguisher tidily, which will be a bit of a task, but I have some ideas. For now though I'm stoked with how the engine bay looks.... tidy and professional-looking. Once I've mounted the rest of the extinguisher in, I'll get Glenn to wire in the control box and mount the bits and pieces in the dash. I've got a bit of work left to do there as well, but that'll pretty much be the last of the things I need to cross off my immediate to-to list. Things are looking good! Oh, and she still continues to drive and run really well. Sump is still full of nice clean oil, no leaks I can see and it's performing how I feel it should. So yeah, onwards!

Just a quick update. I've nto done much on the car this last week or so except clean it up after the trackday. I hope to do a touch more on the extinguisher install this weekend and get the nozzles mounted in the engine bay. This weekend I also want to bleed through the brakes and clutch and also re-bleed the coolant circuit since it's had long enough now to work most of the air through to the trap points. And as soon as this crappy Spring Auckland weather stops raining every day, I might even get out and chuck another 150 miles or so on her Hopefully I can get her back to the dyno towards the end of the month to get the fun tune on her

Peugeots are renowned for having dodgy driving ergonomics. The same problem you have in your 405, I have in my 306 GTi6. And yeah, these cars don't really come alive til you push them. My Pug gets boring from time to time and I often think about swapping it for something more interesting, but then I find myself on a twisty road and all of a sudden it wins me over again. And I'm reminded of how cheap it is to run and how reliable it is and there's never any reason to get rid.

Haha no, seriously I was taking it fairly easy on her..... I was having some fun for sure, but I wasn't driving anywhere near 10/10ths in it.... it'd break my heart if I bent it or blew it up.

Right, well a red-letter day in the rebuild really as on Saturday I took the Exige down to Taupo for the CJC Jerkfest trackday at the Taupo short track. Up at 4am to meet up with James & Nikki Colverson in their S2 Exige S and my friends Richy and Ryan who also convoyed down in Richy's awesome MkII Triumph PI. What followed was a day of fun and (thud far) faultless Exige running. I've got 500 miles on the car now, some of which was around the track and it's feeling really good. Still not as fast as it will be by a country mile with a 6500RPM limiter, and with me generally short-shifting somewhere around 5500-6000RPM, but it feels perkier than it did in March and then some. It got through the trackday without burning any oil (last time it burned a lot) and the oil is still clear and smelling sweet... last time it blackened very quickly and smelled like petrol. I was very cautious on track and took care to keep the oil temp to under 100 degrees as I wanted to be VERY conservative with the car, but I was able to use the track to get some useful load on the engine without stressing it too much. The handling is FANTASTIC, and while it's only a base setup to improve on, it's going to be one very quick car when I can unleash it... and that's even WITH old 048s that feel like they're made of stone. I did see a few drips of oil on the undertray when I put it away Saturday night but I also see the gearbox has blown a little oil out of the breather vent, which was something I'd expected to happen running it so full of oil. It's on my list of things to make up a new catch-tank for the car at some point with a dual-chamber... one for the engine (as it currently uses) and one for the gearbox. That way I can keep the box nice and full. So now I'll post up a few photos courtesy of the Jerks that were out in force with the cameras on Saturday: The Exige sitting in the pits (photo courtesy of Caleb Wong): Nice fisheye shot of the engine bay, looking shiny! (photo courtesy of Brian Cox): And another fisheye shot, this time of one very happy muppet behind the wheel! (photo courtesy of Brian Cox): Then, of course, a few photos of the Exige doing its thing on track (photos courtesy of Royce Mihaere): OVERSTEER! And of course, I've promised some video, so here's some video I snapped on my GoPro of a session on track... you can see I'm driving it pretty gently, so expect it to be an animal once I let it off its leash! Also present on the day was my father, who brought his E-type along. He's not yet strong enough in the neck to risk a day blatting around the track in his helmet, but it was the first time he's been back at a trackday since his horrific accident and he loved the atmosphere. He was also kind enough to let me take the old girl out for a spin around the track. He offered me a drive at a trackday back in '06 and I declined for fear of bending it. This weekend though (after regretting not accepting the offer before!) I made sure I took him up on it. I was still being pretty gentle with the old girl, after all she is 47 years old! It didn't stop me having a little bit of fun with her though and the 3.8L XK engine on track just sounds so wonderful! Even though I loved having the Exige there and it was very special for me.... being able to give the Jaguar its head of steam was the day's highlight for me Here's a video of that session So yeah, that was the Saturday... no dramas and a car that behaved and performed fairly well.... RESULT! Next weekend I'll be giving it a clean, fashioning up a temporary breather tube for the gearbox and hopefully finishing painting up the extinguisher nozzle mounts in the engine bay.... if it's fine I'll even take it for a drive! I'll finish with this shot, which I love. My car with the Colversons' Exige in the background (photo courtesy of Mr Richard Opie Esq.):

Well not a LOT to report this weekend. It's been pi$$ing down all day today today and I'm knackered so been spending some time with the better half instead, but yesterday I got the car washed and cleaned up a bit as well as a couple more peripheral bits bolted on. I masked up the engine bay finishers and test-painted the extinguisher nozzle mounts matt-black. I've got the other two still to do as they're in the engine bay and harder to mask... so I'll probably brush-paint them instead since they're so small. The two I've done turned out really well so I hope to get a chance to do the other ones in the next week or so. No huge hurry at this stage anyway. With the car cleaned, Brad came around and got a couple of shots of the car for the next issue of G-FORCE magazine, which is due out the week after next. I've yet to see the shots, but here's a couple of quickies I snapped with my phone. I'm hoping for finer weather next weekend so I can take the car for a run down to Taupo and back and maybe even do a bit of run-in work around the circuit where I'll be taking my father's E-Type on a trackday... all going well. The engine still sounds and goes sweetly. Nothing leaking or weeping yet, and it doesn't seem to be using any oil or coolant, which is a bonus. There's about 50 miles on the engine now (plus the 3-4 hours of dyno work) so the most critical part of the run in is past, but we'll still do it by the book with the run-in oil until we're at about 800 miles or so. On the still-to-do list is the following: - Paint the remaining extinguisher nozzle mounts in the engine bay - Mount the engine bay extinguisher nozzles and run the lines from the rear bulkhead to the nozzles. - Mount the remote charge cannister on the extinguisher, hopefully inside the footwell divider out of sight. - Get Glenn to wire up the extinguisher circuit all tidy to match the rest of the vehicle wiring. - Cut up my spare dash piece and lay up a carbon fibre console to sit in the radio slot to hold the MoTeC MDD, the extinguisher controller and a couple of buttons as well as the vehicle CANBus connector. - Get some more correctly-coloured blue Alcantara material to upholster the modified dash piece in. - Get the car remapped after run-in. - Do some trackdays. On the horizon is a bit of a refurb on the wheels along with some new tyres since the 048s on it are now as hard as bullets from sitting in the garage for 4 years.... shame since they're almost new in terms of wear! Then maybe I'll get shopping for a set of TMR alloys... all in good time.

Well, I'm officially road legal again! The six-monthly faffing around that is a WOF is always entertaining. It got through relatively easy this time until it came to the brake testing on the rollers.... it came up with a pretty bad front brake imbalance and failed. I took the car away and got it out onto the motorway for a few hard stops thinking the discs just needed a clean-up from all the oily fingerprints etc they probably had on them. I got the car back and it passed.... JUST. This was a little concerning but after reading about it, Elises/Exiges are notorious for reading well under on the left-front wheel on a brake test roller as there's not enough weight on the wheel to grip the roller properly. Certainly you can stop on the road lightly or heavily without the steering wheel pulling anywhere, so I'm picking it's more of a problem with the testing method than the brakes themselves. I've got to re-bleed the brakes and clutch in the next week or two anyway as it's only got crap fluid in it at the moment (what we put in when my clutch line failed on the dyno in March). So if there's any air left in the brakes (although it doesn't feel like it) it'll get worked out then. But the main thing is I'm all legal to go again, which makes me happy. Now I just need a sunny weekend so I can get to work with the mile-munching!

Nice! I'll have to watch that later, up loud!

Theirs is an S2 Exige. Less power than mine had stock for stock and 150+kg heavier. The S2 Exige is basically an Elise with a roof. The S1 was a racing variant of the Elise.

It's ok, their Lotus isn't a particularly fast or rare one Still, should be nippy enough to give you a thrill

HAha if I did, I'd have a finished Exige I couldn't drive thanks to certain missing appendages.

Would love to, but already have plans tonight

If it was 99, it'd be rover powered. Toyota engines only came along in the 04. A stock Elise is a wonderful thing to behold. I miss my old one, so delicate and fun. I also miss my father's one, sadly that one's never coming back. In the market for another not though

Took her for her first drive today! Well first in her current iteration anyway. Took it over to get a wheel alignment done and it behaved a lot nicer on the way home. It's got a 6500RPM limiter on it so it's killing the power at about the 170nhp mark but you can feel she just wants to take off! It's sounding a lot better than it did before too.... creamily smooth and sounds so crisp! No leaks, no rattles, gearbox is behaving itself, so touch wood it's all looking good. It's idling happily at 1050RPM but sounds like it wants to rip your face off doing it. Handling is incredible. It's been so long since I've driven it, I'm falling in love all over again. Tomorrow lunchtime I'mma take it down to get its WOF so it's all officially road legal again, then I just need some nice fine weekend days to start racking up some miles. With daylight savings and long sunny* evenings only another week away... timing couldn't have been better**. * Sunny not guaranteed.... actually this is the most unpredictable time of year weatherwise. ** Actually it'd have been nice this time of year three years ago thanks!

Well a VERY full on day today, has kept me very busy! I spent the fist part of the day making up some brackets to hold the fire extinguisher nozzles in the engine bay. No photos of these yet, as they're currently curing as I've bonded them to the back face of the dressing panels in the engine bay. Should be good to fit next weekend. The remainder of the day was spent refitting the rear clam and hatch with the help of my good friend Richy, followed by the rear arches etc. and I got finished about an hour ago: The camera and car looks like shit as it was just my phone and I've not yet cleaned it so it's caked in shit. That can wait for a week or two until I'm sure that it's not going to have to come to bits again. The only minor pisser was that the rear clam has picked up a scratch in the past few months sitting in the garage where I suspect my landlord was a little clumsy getting his toolbox out past the clam. Most of it'll buff out and it's not too noticeable but it did just piss me off a bit. I've not done anything with the bodywork on the car yet, so I guess I'll get it 100% next year if I can be bothered when I respray the car to get it perfect. In the meantime, I'm having a beer to celebrate a hard day's work. I'm looking forward to getting the wheel alignment and WOF done this week so I can start putting some miles on.

Well, so far so good! One day of work down on the car and the car now starts and runs. Today went fairly smoothly with only a couple of minor hiccups but all in all everything went to plan. The engine started pretty easily this time around after a couple of coughs and splutters it started after about 6 seconds on the starter. Tomorrow I'll be getting the bodywork back in place and hopefully taking the car for a quick shakedown/test run before its WOF and wheel alignment during the week. Smooth sailing.

A small update, but no pics tonight. The engine's back mated with the gearbox after a bit of struggling around, and the engine is now sitting happily back in the engine bay. MASSIVE thanks to Nikki and James Colverson again who this time came around in their stunning electric-lime-coloured Exige S260 to lend a couple of pairs of much-appreciated hands. It took a good three hours to get the box and engine reunited, then the whole lot back in the engine bay as it put up a decent fight and we were going very carefully. But it's in there now and that means first thing in the morning I can begin the task of hooking everything up. Having the engine already back in is a MASSIVE head start compared to where I wanted to be. Car will be back in one piece before the end of the weekend! HUZZAH!

Just a quick update. I've got the gearbox back this afternoon, along with a bag of old bits we've replaced. Here's the old 5th gear and 5th/6th selector mechanism. It's clear that this has run dry and gotten hot which has caused the failure along with previous wear in the box. Should be good to go from here on in! Going to spend tomorrow night in the garage after work, get the box back on the engine and hopefully get the engine back in the hole. Plan is to spend Saturday hooking it all back up and refilling with fluids. Sunday we'll get the engine started followed by the remounting of all the bodywork ready to get a WOF and rear wheel alignment early in the week.

The last of my gearbox bits arrived today finally! The gearbox will be reassembled this afternoon and I'll pick it up before lunch tomorrow. Thank goodness! This weekend I can screw it all together, stuff it back in the hole and turn the key!