Esprit

A successful evening's work tonight. I started off by doing a job I'd missed first time around and figured that now was a good time to do it. Lubricating the rose joints on the rear toe links. Getting grease to these under the dust covers isn't easy, so thankfully having a sister who's a vet and can get me giant needles, I ground the tip off the needle to blunt it and it worked rather well for injecting the grease into the joints. Top job! Then SELOCers James and Nikki came around to say hello and to lend a hand hoisting the engine in. Another friend, Brad, turned up shortly thereafter and between all of us the engine was in in about 30 minutes. Another hour and the driveshafts were in, the engine mounts were bolted in, the hubs were reassembled and the clutch slave was half-reinstalled. A successful night's work! Back into it early tomorrow to begin the long task of hooking everything back up, adding oil and water etc., bleeding and getting the thing running. By tomorrow, night, hopefully I'll have the engine running and have the car test-driven to check that all is well. Hopefully that leaves Sunday for reinstalling the bodywork, interior, undertrays etc.... Game on!

The rev-limiter is just a set point in the ECU whereby fuel is cut and the engine will not rev past. On a programmable ECU like the Motec in my car, you can set this to be whatever you like it to be.

Yeah mine's one of the earlier, lighter, more powerful Rover-engined cars. The S2 Exige has the VVTL-i Toyota engine that switches to a high-lift camshaft profile above about 6000RPM. Mine's the same, only it's in high-lift configuration from 0RPM upwards

Engine and gearbox are back as one tonight! Took a bit of struggling and swearing to do it singlehandedly but now the donk is ready to drop back in. Just need an extra pair of hands tomorrow night or Saturday to help guide the engine back in the hole and get it bolted back up to the mounts. From that point on I've got several hours of hooking everything back up, re-running wiring and then adding fluids/bleeding etc, and she should be a runner again. As motivation, I've uploaded this little clip to youtube. It was taken last Thursday when I was trying to diagnose the rattle, and is just me driving and giving it a little squirt. rev limiter cuts in at about 5650RPM so it's only just getting interesting by the time it does, but she seems to go as well as she used to, even with the foreshortened rev range. The camera doesn't pick up the engine noise that well and seems to pick up more background noise than anything else, but hey... it still sounds nice!

Just a quickie update on the run. The gearbox came apart this morning and Ken focussed his attention on the reverse gear shift mechanism, as I suspected this was the cause of the issue. He was quickly able to discover that the gearbox had been assembled missing a single ballbearing detent on the reverse lockout mechanism, meaning that (as I suspected) the reverse idler was moving into contact with the input shaft under LH cornering loads. A cheap, quick fix and hopefully the source of the noise. There was no evident damage caused by this rattle in the gearbox. As I suspected the contact was very light and sounded worse than it was. Still, it's better not happening at all, so I'm happy. Will work on getting the engine and box bolted back together in the next couple of days and hopefully have the engine hoisted and bolted back in the car by the weekend. Then it should be about a day's work to get everything hooked back up, refilled, bled and fired up. I'll do a few test-drives around the neighbourhood with the body off to check for leaks and rattles before the bodywork is reinstated. By mid next week I hope to be in a position to take the car for a WOF. Also, some of the international readers might like to know that yesterday's earthquake in Christchurch is about 900km South of where I am in Auckland. We didn't even feel it up here, so, me and the car is completely fine. Obviously, everyone in New Zealand is preoccupied with our Cantabrian brothers and sisters, and it's at times like these where one's own troubles fade into somewhat less significance. Onwards and upwards!

Another long evening in the garage and the juggernaut rolls onward.... I got the sump removed this evening and spent a couple of hours cleaning up the flanges before resealing them with Loctite 518. The sump was then re-torqued in place and is ready to go again. The flywheel and clutch have also been reinstalled and torqued along with the manifold. I also went around the engine and re-torqued everything as per factory spec. So that's the engine finished and ready to go back in. Tomorrow the attention turns to the gearbox. I'm dropping it off to Ken at KW in the morning and he'll strip it down tomorrow afternoon... fingers crossed, by Wednesday we'll have it on the mend and ready to mate to the engine again.... hopefully meaning that late this week we can hoist the whole lot back in the car and begin the long process of hooking everything up again and making it look tidy.

Well, after the recent setbacks, it's time to reinstate the characteristic British stiff upper lip and follow the motto: This afternoon I rolled my sleeves up and got back into the garage and whipped the clutch and flywheel off the engine and proceeded to examine the crank seal. It didn't appear to be leaking too badly, maybe a slight weep, but certainly it didn't seem bad. I already had a spare one anyway so I decided to pull the old one (after a whole 15 miles of driving) and replace it... this time myself, so making sure that everything was scrupulously clean and just-right before reinstalling. I degreased everything, removed all the old RTV and wiped everything down several times with acetone. I made up a special tool to help me press the new seal in squarely and then lubed up the seal and the crank journal with fresh engine oil. The seal was then dressed (as per the Rover manual) with Loctite 587 RTV before being inserted home: Let's hope that third time's a charm eh? Now, because the crank seal didn't seem to be leaking that much, I've also decided to pull the sump and clean everything up here too and re-do the sump-to-cradle seal. I did this before when I pulled the sump from the engine to insert the baffles, and there's a possibility that it might be leaking from here too... it's also a case of it being a lot easier to do with the engine out and the sump fully accessible. So the oil got drained (I believe the 4th time, or the 5th time I've drained this engine... at least it'll be good and flushed of build debris now! I've also pulled the manifold off in preparation for dropping the sump. So tomorrow's job will be to pull the sump and clean all this up immaculately and get it back in place with a fresh Loctite 510 seal in place.... hopefully this means the engine will stop weeping the good stuff. Tomorrow's job is to see is I can order some fresh snap-rings and seals for the gearbox driveshafts..... I've had them in and out so much now that it's probably a good idea to replace these as a matter of good procedure. I'll also talk to Ken at KW Historics in the morning. I had booked him in on Wednesday to pull my engine out, but since that's now out, I might enlist him to strip, inspect, repair and reassemble the gearbox... as I doubt I'll have much free time this week. All going to plan, I might be able to book next weekend out to getting the engine back in the car, and hopefully this time in seven days I can post an update that the engine runs again... then I've just gotta reinstall the bodywork and get the bloody thing run in.... not before time! Oh and just a quick thanks I missed off in my last update. Massive thanks to my friends Ian Wilson (for lending me his engine hoist) and Heath Simone (for donating muscle, beer and spanner time) this weekend... it's nice when fellow petrolheads help each other out at times like these... Cheers guys!

A rather heartbreaking day today... feels like a million steps back... car now looks like it did a year ago Still, looking on the bright side, I found out the gearbox drain plug was stripped, so at least I can assume that that would have shaken loose at some point in the future and I'll never have a better chance to helicoil it than I do now.... still doesn't make looking at these photos any easier though I'm off for a drink.

Well the guy I bought it off is a pretty respected name in Lotus circles and I know him personally.... if it turns out he sold me a pup, I'm sure the damage to his reputation would be worth a fair bit to him, given that I'm also pretty fondly thought of in Lotus circles. The latest news is that I've confirmed that the noise is coming from inside the gearbox, it cannot be anything else.... so out it comes.

The gearbox was a used, rebuilt unit I bought from the UK. I suspect it was opened before it was sold to me and it's been reassembled incorrectly as it won't have been making these noises when it came out of the racer it was in. Not an intentional mistake by the seller I'll wager, but one that's going to cost me arms, legs and other appendages.

The transmission's not really the issue here. I'm sure that when I've stripped the trans, I can fix the idler with scrappy parts (or even cannibalise parts from my spare PG1 gearbox if I REALLY need to)... it's just that with the 6-speed box, it needs to come out with the engine complete (the 5-speed can be twisted and drop out the bottom). To get the engine out, the rear clam needs to come off (about an afternoon's work for two people in itself)... to get the rear clam off, the seats and the interior need to be removed..... so just getting the thing to a stage where I can take it to bits is a good day's work.

Well... I KNEW it was too fucking good to be true! The car's coming to bits again! F%^K!!!!!!!!!!! I've done a few short drives with the car (still not road legal) to work out some small bugs, and one thing I noticed is that the car had a bit of a rattle when turning left. It's a metallic rattle that increases with cornering load. Very hard to capture on camera, but here's a short clip here, you can hear it as I turn through the apex of the corner: It sounds like gears skipping against each other, and it only happens when turning left. It's fine when straight or turning right. Initially I thought it was the LSD just doing LSD-like things, buq the fine gents at Quaife confirmed that the diff should be silent. My second guess was that the new Powerlite starter pinion was fouling the ring gear when turning left. I swapped back to the old starter and the noise remained. I've checked EVERYTHING else, hubs, driveshafts, general engine bay, heatshields and there's nothing external I can find that is making the noise. The rattle doesn't seem to be happening in neutral, with the car jacked up on the left side and running so that rules out it being anything internal to the engine.... so that only leaves the gearbox. A bit of research on the standard Rover PG1 gearbox, I came across this little gem on Google: "Some gearboxes showed early problems but those should all have been repaired under warranty. A bunch of PG1 gearboxes had been assembled without the ball bearing and spring that locate the reverse idler gear. On left turns the idler gear can slide and catch on the top gear cog giving an horrible grinding noise. " Now, the Quaife QKE4R box shares the PG1 reverse arrangement, so I imagine that either something is broken inside the box here or it's been incorrectly assembled last time and the reverse idler gear is sliding across and fouling during left hand turns. On the PG1 box, this issue has been known and many owners just put up with it, it does no real damage and is barely noticeable in a normal car. In the Exige it's pretty intrusive, and given the vale of the gearbox, it's best to strip and rebuild the box..... especially since every time I turn left, the gearbox is essentially trying to find reverse gear! Not the sort of thing I want happening on a track at speed! This means it has to come out.... with the engine... which means removing the engine cover.... and the rear bodywork.... which means removing the seats and the interior..... which, right now, is the world's biggest piss-off! To day I'm annoyed or disappointed right now is an understatement of the century. Most of the last fortnight's work in getting the body reattached is now for nothing and will have to be undone and re-done again. On the plus side, I managed to finish up the front compartment and get the battery isolator mounted in place, which looks perfect.... but in the light of today's development, it doesn't really matter any more does it? Anyone want to make me an offer for the car before I torch it?

A little more progress to add tonight. Took the car into work to make use of the flattest floor I've got available to me. With the help of two 20L drums of oil, a 20L tank of diesel, a 40L bag of gardener's potting mix and a couple of steel plates, I managed to get 82kg (my fully suited and helmeted weight) into the driver's seat and proportioned about right. with 20L of petrol in the tank, it represents the mid-laden track weight of the car, and the state I run it in at the track, and on the road. I then spent about 2 hours getting the ride heights set and it's now 100mm at the front and 110mm at the rear, just the way I want it. I didn't have corner scales with me so I'll probably do a more detailed setup at some point, but that'll do for now. I'll take it into an alignment place in the next few days to get the toe set, and to see what the camber's doing. From there I should be able to calculate what needs to happen with the camber shims to get things right and I can make those adjustments before getting the string-lines out to fine-tune the toe.... she should be all ready to get a WOF then... hopefully this weekend

Aah, yes, that's good news... I'll definitely be heading their way then

Dr diesel is just around the corner from here

On that topic, if anyone knows of any GC WOF agents in Auckland, let me know.... I'm not looking for dodgy stuff, just someone small who won't mind me taking my car through the WOF with them... I've seen people jack Lotuses in places that potentially write the chassis off... makes me cringe.

Yeah... in the end, even if it ends up over 230 (doubtful), how are they gonna know/prove etc? If they want me to test it, it's easy to pull some timing out and make it runless powerful I expect to have fights because of the adjustable suspension and harnesses.... I'm fine because they're both OEM fitment, but that's kinda a rare case and not many inspectors know the rules.

Thanks for the comments guys As for cert, no it doesn't need it. 6-speed is a direct replacement for OEM, so no worries there... mounts are the same, which is all that matters. More power, STRICTLY speaking it is on the cusp of needing one (>20% power hike) but given it was 192bhp new (as the stats say) and it's going to be about 230bhp, it's right on the limit, so not massively powered up... so it won't need a cert for anything... will have to see how I get on at a WOF though, I expect to have arguments. As for that Black Elise, that's a Sport111, a VERY nice model of S2 that only we in NZ, Australia and Hong Kong got.... pretty rare and I'd love one. That one's recently sold to a new owner I don't know... I know OF him, but that's about it

A very VERY long weekend in the garage this weekend. Worked from 6pm til midnight on Friday night on the car, then back in there at 9am on Saturday and worked right through until about 7am on Sunday morning! I had arranged for the car to be part of the Club Lotus NZ stand at the Intermarque Concours show at Ellerslie. The first job was to make up and fit my new rear heatshield. The old heatshield had disintegrated about the mounts and was gradually crumbling away so I had a replica pressed up in aluminium sheet and bought some heatshield fabric to cover it with. Here you can see the old shield, new shield and fabric together. I did however make a bit of a cock up and it turns out my proposed setup would have been a lot heavier than the OEM shield. I pressed on and fettled the new shield to fit though. However, after all of this, I decided I'd import some Nimbus heatshield material as this would be lighter and more durable than the OEM stuff. In the meantime, I've repaired the old shield and mounted that in the car. I'll use the "new" shield as a pattern for the one I've yet to make up. It's not high on the priority list though, so I'll get some Nimbus material on the way and I'll worry about it down the line. It's an afternoon's work to swap to a new shield when the time comes, so not a massive job. The rest of the time was spent getting the seats and rear fascia out so the rear clam could be bolted back on properly. I got it all shimmed out and the shut lines pretty good. Other little jobs involved reinstalling the boot divider, captive fasteners for the undertrays and inner arches, as well as cleaning up the inner arches themselves and fitting them. I also fitted my new undertray and diffuser, the first time they've been on the car. Given they're a first-shot kinda thing, they fitted pretty well and are surprisingly rattle-free on the car. So this basically means that after 3 years, the car is FINISHED!!!! Ok, so it's not finished, I've still got a lot of little finishing things to do, but the car is actually a car again, and can be driven... so that's a result! At 9am Sunday, I got the car out of the garage and DROVE it to Ellerslie (about a 3-4 mile trip). It's not registered or warranted yet, so was trying to keep pretty low-key. Initial impressions are that it's in DIRE need of a geo since it was crabbing all over the road. I'll get the ride heights set this week and then get a rough geo check done on it at the local alignment place to find out where we're at camber/caster wise. I'll then get the rear bumpsteer adjusted how I want it, before getting a final toe adjustment done. The car should handle pretty bang on then. Driving around at 50km/h can't tell you much about the car, but I'm surprised how driveable it is. It's more lumpy for sure than it used to be, but certainly it's no harder to drive than it was in stock form. Once the revs are up a little, the throttle response is amazing, and although the rev limiter is killing the party at 5000 at the moment, it fair takes off once the revs pass 4000! I've got a very very slight rattle coming from the gearbox (actually I suspect the diff) when turning left. It sounds like a bit of backlash in the differential or something. I've e-mailed Quaife about it to see if it's a normal sort of noise or not, but I suspect it's nothing to worry about. There's no noise when going straight or turning right, but when turning left (either gently or sharply) there's a tiny bit of gear chatter. I don't know if it's happening under power as the induction noise drowns out EVERYTHING, including the noise.... but given how it sounds, it's a "slack" sort of noise so I suspect it's only a case when there's little load on the diff. At the concours, the car was rather well received. I even met a few people who have been reading this blog on various forums, and it was fantastic to talk to them about how they came across it and how they think the car has turned out. It's always nice to know that by reading this tome, others have managed to get something out of my experiences here too. I didn't snap any photos, but my friend Tom managed to snap one on my behalf with Tony Herbert's Type 14 Elite in the background: Work in the next week or two will centre around getting the basic suspension setup done and getting it warranted and registered for the road. Then I can begin the run-in work in earnest and check for issues. A very positive weekend and one that I've waited so very long for!

Yeah... I've binned the idea of mounting a bench seat in the back

Well another busy weekend with the car, although little in the way of actual progress to show. This weekend just gone was the weekend of the 4 and Rotary Nationals here in Auckland. This is the largest performance car show and drag racing event of the year. My friends in the CJC club were putting together a club stand for the show and I decided to see if I could squeeze my car onto their display. A couple of weeks ago it became apparent that the car wouldn't be 100% completed for the show so I decided that I'd show the car on the display with the rear clam removed, at least giving the punters something a bit different to look at than just another shiny car! On Thursday night I got to washing, clay-baring, polishing and generally treating the car to a good clean-up. My friends Richy and Gung were up to stay at my place for the show from Palmerston North and Wellington respectively so I had some extra hands on board. SELOCer Eddie even popped by all the way from the UK to have a looksee too! That's commitment. Anyway, about 10:30pm, we FINALLY got the rear clam muscled back into position on the car. This was a massive step for me as it's the first time I've seen the car "complete" for almost 3 years! Eddie snapped this photo of the happy owner surveying his work: The clam was only mounted in place with a couple of fasteners and some duct tape... just enough to hold the bugger on as it was to be removed again. Friday morning dawned and the car was trucked over to the showgrounds. I could have driven it but she's still not road legal so trucking was the best bet. Car got off the truck and through registration for the show: (pic credit to 4 and Rotary) Friday was then spent setting up the stand and getting the cars ready for display. (pic credit to NZ Performance Car Magazine): (pic credit to 4 & Rotary): (pic credit to Brian from the mighty CJC): The car was pretty well received, despite not really being the usual sort of thing you see at the 4 & Rotary show. There was a lot of interest in it from the punters, mainly thanks to having its guts hanging out and thus having something interesting to gawk at! The car didn't win any awards, but given my efforts to keep things stock-looking and to enhance things subtly, it's almost validation of my work that most of the work I've done passed unnoticed The CJC stand however did land us "Best overall club" award, which was just reward for the hard work put in by all of the Jerks. It was a fun weekend and hopefully I can be involved again next year with a more complete car! (pic credit to keisuke at 86Fighters): The car's now back home sitting under her dust cover (the first time I've used THAT in a while (I've only used it twice since forking out a bomb for it back in early '08!). I'm trying to keep the car clean since it's going to be on the Club Lotus display at the Ellerslie Concours in a couple of weeks. I've also designed up the rear heat shield and sent this off to manufacture. This is the only thing holding me up now from getting the bodywork mounted properly, which is the only thing stopping me getting it back on the road. Give me a couple of weeks and we'll be back rolling again and getting some run-in miles under my belt! Game on!

Yeah well ain't that the truth. Either way, it looks like the hard-core, focussed Lotus is on the extinction list..... That's precisely the reason I love the S1 Exige, is that in my eyes it's probably THE most hardcore, focussed road/trackday car ever made that's actually still a car (so not something like a caterham, atom etc that has questionable weather protection, no doors/boot etc.)... For sure, if Danny Bahar doesn't ruin Lotus, I think he's taking it in a direction that distances itself from a few of their most notable models in the past.

Well work has continued these past couple of days. Mainly clean-up type stuff. All of the interior fabrics have been meticulously cleaned, as has the interior of the tub. All alloy components have been treated with ACF50 to ensure ongoing corrosion resistance. Tonight I hope to get the rear clam offered back up in place, get the car washed and clay-bar'd and then polished up, which will be the first time it's looked anything like a car in a long looong time. Another thing that arrived today, is one of those VERY cool little "finishing" things that really ice the cake on a job like this. You'll recall that the car's running a Quaife 6-speed gearbox now in place of the original Rover PG1-B4BP Close-Ratio box. The stock gearknob, which I've reverted to has the gearshift-pattern on a small badge on the top of the knob. What I wanted to do was to keep the car 100% stock-looking with the new box, so I've had some badges made up using the exact same "metalphoto" anodising process as the OEM badge. I destroyed my original 5-speed badge in the experimentation process, but here's a photo of it, alongside the CAD rendering I did of what I designed to replace it: I got the completed badge back today and it's bloody perfect... the badge is a dead-ringer for the original one, so I'm very very happy. It's the little finishing touches like this that I think really make a project like this... hopefully showing that genuine thought and effort has gone into ensuring everything is just right

Another night in the garage last night and thankfully had a lot back from anodising, so was ale to make some progress. Finally got the correctly-made coil bracket anodised and fitted. The coil now sits as it will permanently. The bracket fits EXACTLY as it should and looks the part. Better fit than OEM! Also got the version 2 battery mount done. This was a slight change from the last one I made since that was to fit the old synergy battery that wouldn't cut the mustard when cranking. This new one fits the Odyssey PC680 battery perfectly and mounts the battery on the floor of the car. Nice and low! This picture is taken without the washer bottle bracket in to hold it all down. Please also excuse the wiring mess, you can see I've added a battery shutoff switch to isolate the earth. This is just hanging mid-air at the moment as I've designed up and am waiting to get back a bracket to mount this properly. This will mount to the vacant rivnuts you can see at the bottom of the picture. This battery shutoff is not a kill switch, nor is it intended to be used as such. It's merely an earth isolator. this is because with the battery laying down like this, it's a 10 minute exercise in contortion and swearing to access and disconnect the battery terminals. If you're wanting to do any electrical or mechanical work on the car, isolating the battery power becomes a frustrating task! This way it's just the flick of a switch to make the car safe to work on. It'll also mean that I can isolate the battery if I have to leave it for a long period somewhere where I don't have access to a charger. Just out of shot on the top right (you can just see a black wire coming towards the camera from the battery) is a charging jack for the battery. This enables me to plug in my intelligent cyclic charger to charge and maintain the battery when the car's not in use for more than a week. Just helps to keep the battery in good health and means that when I do want to use it, it'll be ready for me. I can have the charger connected with everything locked up and the car alarmed too, which is a nice feature. Another thing I finished off last night was my new, deeper rear diffuser. I designed and made this over 3 years ago but never fitted it to the car as I pulled it to bits before it was finished. However it's finished now and ready to hang back on the car when it's rolling again. This one is just made up in black anodised aluminium and is just a prototype. If it proves successful I'll probably make another in dry carbon to make it lighter and stiffer. Won't have a lot of time to work on the car tonight but intend getting everything bar the isolator switch finished inside the front compartment and want to get the rest of the interior cleaned out and done.

Today was a day of little progress to show. I spent a chunk of the day cleaning up various bits and giving the car an oil and filter change as the engine's done a couple hours running now. Fresh mineral oil in for the remainder of the run-in. I got to take the car out for a shakedown up and down my road (private road, honestly officer!). Happy to report that the car goes as well as it should up to about 3000RPM but is rather grumpy down low... a road tune will probably sort some of this out, but it'll never be perfect. One thing's for sure it's in desperate need of a geo! I managed to get the Motec SLM fitted in today. Since the seats went in yesterday, the two spots I had earmarked for it were both no-gos. Putting it on top of the steering column cowl obscured a couple of the Stack warning lights as well as the engine temperature. Putting it on top of the binnacle shroud made it invisible behind the steering wheel rim. My solution was to stick it upside down, here: I can programme it to work in reverse and the cabling hides away nicely. It's in the perfect position for the eye and doesn't obscure either tacho or speedo gauge more than a couple of mm. It's just stuck on with industrial adhesive tape right now so I can reposition if necessary, but it'll stay mounted until I decide to move it. The other little job was to mount the engine cover hinge, which is now done. I also got the engine cover out for a look as it's sat under my bed in careful storage for almost 3 years. Really makes the back end look like it should! Jobs for the rest of the week involve cleaning out and fitting the rest of the interior (carpets, footrest etc) and to get a couple of things finished up out back. I've designed up the mount for the battery shutoff switch up front and will kick off manufacture of this tomorrow... I'm also just trying to finish up the design of the rear heatshield panel to get that underway too.... The list of things to do now before having some fun in it is only a page long in my notebook now, so we must be getting close