Esprit's '01 Exige Over-winter refresh

[Esprit]

Just a quick hour or two in the garage tonight, pottering about as ya do.

Firstly, I must start with an admission. Tonight, I sunk to new lows of GJOBness... I think it confirms my madness. I actually made up a bucket of warm, soapy Meguiars, and gave the crash structure a sponge-bath, both inside and out. I never thought I'd get QUITE so bad as to clean out the inside of my crash structure, but there you go... new lows have been achieved!

However, I'm pleased to report that 23000 miles of road grime, fly guts and grit have now been replaced by clean looking carbonfibre.... so that's something right?

It wasn't all spongebaths though as I managed to get the refurbed radiator fan mounted back onto the new radiator:

I then also managed to get the radiator remounted in its carrier frame, although only loosely, since I realised I didn't have any of the M6 penny-washers I needed.... will borrow some from work tomorrow and sort it then.... still, it at least LOOKS like it's got a radiator again, and that's gotta be a good thing!

[Esprit]

What better to do on a Friday night than work on one's broken-arse car?!?!

This afternoon I went over to see the fine folk at Rivtec to get some rivnuts. This allowed me to insert the rivnuts required to finish up the battery clamp.

Spent this evening with a Stanley knife, double-sided adhesive tape and skinned EVA foam sheet (1.2mm) and lined the inside of the battery clamp with the foam. The object of this was to make sure the battery sat inside the clamp nice and snug, with no chance of any rattles. An hour or so and 'twas complete!

Beholdeth!

Then it was time for the moment of truth... bolting it inside the chassis.... and the result is that it's worked out PERFECTLY, I couldn't be happier with it.

Once it's situated in, the washer bottle mount is bolted on via the thee button-head screws you can see below. Then you simply bolt the sliding washer bottle mount to the chassis as you do normally, whilst putting some downward pressure on it (to put the new battery clamp in compression).

This done, the battery is now locked in SOLID, the stiffness the shape gives it is surreal and if anything I could have probably gone a touch lighter on the design (although it'd have become hard to manufacture). Trying to tug at the battery with all my strength results in no perceptible flexure. WIN!

So all in all, 230 grams of bracket locks it all together nicely.

Here you can see the whole lot bolted in place:

And in more detail:

And finally, with the washer bottle installed in its mount, to show that it all fits how it's supposed to.

Sad thing is, that with the washer bottle in it you don't get to see the pretty clamp assembly... but oh well, some of the most beautiful works of engineering are hidden I reckon all up the battery clamp cost about $100 from go to whoa (about 43 quid). Of course it's also required several hours of my time, but if I started billing hours to this rebuild project, I'd end up in tears I'm sure.

Only question mark over the battery now is whether the cables will reach. I'm going to have to clip and remake some of the cable ties to get them to reach I think, and it'll be an absolute pain in the arse to screw the terminals on, but I'm pretty sure it'll work out without having to extend the loom at all. It's not ideal, but that's the price you pay for mounting the battery like that and the associated stability / C.O.G. benefits.

More tomorrow

*edit* Just looking at the photos, I can see I'm REEEEALLY going to have to get in there with a vacuum cleaner and get rid of that dead fly!

[Esprit]

Right, well today was a day of delayed progress.... but progress nonetheless, and I'm almost at a huge milestone

Started the day by prepping the floor-mat securing studs. These were riveted and bonded to the floor, and I had to get rid of the old rivets and the old adhesive gunked underneath them.... what better tool for this than a lathe?!?!? One of which I happened to have handy!

This enabled me to clean them up and punch out the old rivets, leaving four clean floor mat studs ready to bond on. I'll probably do this next weekend as it's a two-person job.

My attention then turned back to the front of the car. I spent two hours cleaning up the rest of the front end (got rid of that damned dead fly!) and then gave the front compartment a liberal wipe-down with ACF-50 to make sure that no aluminium corrosion will occur in any of the hard-to-reach places.

I then got to thinking whether there were any other jobs I wanted to do before the front clam went back on. The only thing I could think of was to clean, lube and realign the door hinges as both doors were hanging a little low (you could feel them rubbing the striker just a little as the door closed).

This done, I had no more excuses not to mount the front clamshell!

Now, the front clam has been resident in my bedroom for the past eighteen months. In fact, my bedroom has been so full of Lotus parts that it's rather cramped at times! No wonder I don't get much sustained interest from women! (Well either that or I'm crap in bed.... or both!). I've been very much looking forward to getting it back on the car!

So I pulled the blanket off I'd had sitting over it to keep it safe and clean and laid eyes on it for the first time in a loooong time!

It then went out to the garage to hang on the car.... this is something I've wanted to see for so bloody long!

Unfortunately, I was then thwarted by being pedantic. It was at that point that I noticed that the powdercoating on the driving light brackets, which looked fine, was basically falling off and the brackets were nice and rusty underneath. I don't know how I'd previously missed them! So mounting the clam had to go on hold for the afternoon while I pulled them off, cleaned them up and painted them. Here's what they looked like once I'd pulled a bit of the old powdercoating off:

These are currently hanging in the garage, waiting for their coating of POR15 to dry. I'll be rubbing them back with some wet/dry tomorrow and then overcoating them with a satin black spray. Because these bits are up the front of the car, potentially in direct sunlight and POR15 isn't UV stable, this'll prevent the paint from looking crap after being exposed to a lot of sunlight.

Tomorrow the front clam WILL go on! HUZZAH!

[Esprit]

Today was one of those days you just wish you'd stayed in bed. Right now I'm sitting here looking at Exige bits wishing I'd never bought the f**king thing. I've just had a complete gutsful.

Today, I decided, on the advice of a few people, to pull the heater/blower box out and inspect it. I had decided previously not to do it since it was working fine. However, after seeing some photos of how shocking they can get, I decoded to bite the bullet as it wasn't the sort of thing that could be done later on.

Getting the bastard out was a fun job in itself, the car's basically built around it so it's a bloody tight squeeze getting it out. A couple hours of swearing and skinned knuckles and I managed to free it. Stripping it down showed what I expected... rusted to f**k. It also showed one of the most shoddy and poorly engineered heater-assemblies I've ever seen in my life. If there's a bit of this car that's good being buried, never to be seen it's this piece of shit. I began to strip it.

Now, the heater box was plastic, the brackets on it had all but dissolved though so these had to be removed. Drilling out the rivets on this proved to be a difficult task, since the plastic it's made out of seems to have been made from the same stuff as Michael Jackson's face.... it wanted to break as soon as you looked at it.

The blower case was in piss poor shape. It had more rust on it than my father's E-Type heater unit did when we rebuilt that car. The only difference was that it was 40 years old and had spent its life in America, whereas this has only 6 years of UK weather. I've said it before and I'll say it again, this is the LAST time I buy a UK import car. It was so rusted that one of the studs holding it to the heater box snapped clean off as I went to separate them.

So began several hours of wire-brushing, scrubbing, buffing etc and I managed to get most of the rust and old paint removed and back to respectable condition.

I then set about making up some studs, one to replace the one that broke off, and three more to replace the rivets that had to be drilled out to release the fan motor from the blower case. These were then welded to the body and it was now ready to be POR15ed.

This is where things went from bad to worse. I was just giving the fan case a final buff on the wire wheel around the welds prior to painting when the wheel snagged on one of the studs (I wasn't paying close enough attention I guess). This ripped it from my hand, smashing my fingers against the workbench and the blower casing to the floor at about a zillion miles an hour.

This was the final straw and so began the longest string of profanities ever shouted by a human being. My finger was beginning to turn purple where it had been all-but dislocated and the fan casing now sat on the floor with a thumping great dent in it.

I decided that at this point I'd had completely enough of this shitty car and went to the tool chest to find a large lump hammer and proceeded to give the sodding fan blower a fitting send-off. F**king thing.

I then went online and ordered a new one from Eliseparts, it just wasn't worth the bloody grief.

Anyone want to buy an Exige? Going cheap, some assembly required.

[bubblegoose]

walk away

lock the garage

and for one week say ''huh? exige? i dont own one of those''

works for me when i get shitty with a car/bike

[My name is Russell]

Swap for a pinto ... shes a runner

[Esprit]

Haha wish I had the luxury to walk away... I'm just getting stroppy with the bitch... she wants to play hardball, she'll get it! I'll beat her yet!

[Esprit]

Right, just a small Tuesday night update!

Have confirmation that the new fan/blower is in transit so if I'm lucky it'll be here by the weekend.

Spent an hour or two in the garage tonight refitting the driving lights. Their name suggests that they'll be useful should I ever actually get to drive this thing.

Here's the refurbished bracketry for them, compare to the photo taken in Saturday's (14 Nov) update and you'll see that it's quite the improvement. Satin Black enamel over POR15 undercoat, means that they should be a lot more durable than the OEM powdercoat.

And here's a shot of the driving lights installed in the crash structure ready to go... at least, despite all the recent troubles, the car is still smiling!

My other task for this evening will be placing a call to Hofmanns and ordering my Chris Randall spec Nitrons. Been meaning to get these underway and should bite the bullet and put wheels in motion before the need for them becomes urgent.

The show goes on....

[EURON8]

How can something of this predigree end in up such poor condition in only 8 years?

[sheepers]

made in England?

[fuel]

More so being on english roads (salt in winter) for a few years.

[Esprit]

More so being on english roads (salt in winter) for a few years.

This.

Believe me, this is not poor condition. I'm lucky in that all of my corrosion has just been surface corrosion, I can still largely clean back to bare metal. Many similar-vintage cars over there have had stuff literally dissolve.

It's purely climactic, it's not uncommon for some cars over there to fail MOTs for structural rust after 3-4 years.

[Testament]

There are almost 0 old cars daily driving in britain from what I saw - anything more than 3-4 years old is considered "really old" by most people. rather alien compared to here where 10 years old is still often considered "new" also huge push on clunkers for cash schemes e.g. competition between different new car dealers to give you more money for your old car etc.

So is there an ETA for engine turning wheels on this thing yet?

[EURON8]

But this was hardly you 10kpound fiat punto or similiar pop down to the shops and pick up kids from school mobile.

you'd think itd hardly get driven in winter and looked after the rest of the time.

[Esprit]

But this was hardly you 10kpound fiat punto or similiar pop down to the shops and pick up kids from school mobile.

you'd think itd hardly get driven in winter and looked after the rest of the time.

The thing with salt corrosion is that once it's sprayed on there, it kinda stays around. Every time it gets wet, the salt re-dissolves and the process starts all over again. Conceivably you only need to drive a car once or twice a year in the wet.

It's the same with roads as well... salt can actually linger around for weeks/months in lesser (but still corrosively significant quantities). There were even rumours that during the seventies, they used to periodically salt some main routes year-round in places to actively increase the demand for the British motor industry.... obviously back in the days before imports became viable and the British motor industry was still very much alive and kicking. Indeed the reputation for British cars being rot-boxes was very much the climate/roading system's problem than the fault of the cars.

Ironically, cars like mine suffer even worse given that they're generally developed on a shoestring budget, with components being made out of metal rather than plastics like a more mass-produced car. Sure you get great chassis and dynamics but the details are often fairly lacking. More exotic brands are even worse. I've heard of Ferrari 360s rusting completely through panels in cars less than 2 years old. Lamborghinis are even worse... even the Murcielagos/Gallardos rust up pretty quick. You just don't tend to hear much about them, thanks to their closed-dealer-network.

So is there an ETA for engine turning wheels on this thing yet?

Plan is to have it back in one piece by Christmas, and running shortly after. Hopefully mapping/tuning will happen through January.

[EURON8]

Yeah figured the salt would hang around,

Thats crazy, stuff buying an expensive car in england haha

[Esprit]

Yeah figured the salt would hang around,

Thats crazy, stuff buying an expensive car in england haha

Yeah, i've vowed never to again.... although I might in the future, just bring a chassis over to turn into a race car... since all of the other crap will be torn out. You don't generally care too much about cosmetics with a race car... the impetus of this build is to have a perfect car built in the original factory mould.... This is my expression of what I would have got if I'd handed Lotus Sport an insane amount of money back in 2001 and asked them to build me the ultimate Exige.

[Esprit]

Quick update: Engine is now built into a long-block. Compression calcs yielded a final result of 11.25 which is a good level... slightly above stock but not hand-grenade material.

Next job is getting the inlet and exhaust manifolds port-matched to the head. After that it's a matter of loading the chassis up on a trailer and uniting the two into one.

Will take some photos when I take my exhaust manifold in tomorrow.

[Esprit]

Well, another tough Friday evening's work on the car.

Today, thanks to Geary's excellent service at Eliseparts, my new heater blower arrived!

Sadly, it looks like it didn't survive its transcontinental trip in the best shape and upon opening the box it was clear to see it'd taken quite a knock. This casing was quite out of shape too!

I had a bit of a look over it and it looked repairable (my last casing certainly wasn't!) so I decided to use it, although I'd have to strip it down, panelbeat it and then rebuild it... so not quite the hassle-free solution I'd hoped for! Eliseparts were very helpful too and agreed to give me a discount on my next purchase, which will be coming shortly.

So with that, it all got a bit deja vu! I stripped the casing down and whacked it about a bit with a ball pein hammer. After about 20 minutes I'd gotten it back into its correct shape again.

I then set about stripping the paint off with the wire wheel and emery. The paint the blower comes with is extremely fragile and thin, which is half the reason they rust out so badly when exposed to the UK elements. This casing was much nicer to strip because I didn't have the rust to contend with!

This would get the POR15 treatment to cover the scratched paint where I'd bashed it a bit and also to protect it with a much more resilient coating.

I got the first coat on, but then ran out of brushes. Given that it was now 2am, I decided to call it a night. I left the casing hanging at work drying. I'll get up early in the morning, pop down to Placemakers and buy some more brushes and get a second coat on before it completes its 12 hour cure cycle.

Hey, at least I got further than I did last weekend!

[Esprit]

Right, well I had most of yesterday away from the car spending time with the family, but today was a full car day again.

I started off by rebuilding the blower unit now that the fan casing was dry. Here you can see it rebuilt and sitting in a vice with weights holding the outlet cowl on while I was waiting for the Sikaflex adhesive to cure.

Test-fitting this cowl on, I could see that it wasn't a great fit, so I made some small additions (adhesive foam rubber) to the fan casing to seal around it a bit better. It should make it a little more efficient I hope.

While I had a tube of Sikaflex open, I decided to bond and rivet the floor mat studs down. This was actually a rather tricky job to do tidily, Sikaflex gets EVERYWHERE! Trying not to get it over upholstery and clothes was a tough mission, but I managed okay.

Here you can see 'em back on the floor, ready for when the mats go back in.

I then got back to the heater box. This was cleaned up and stainless washers were bonded on to the heater casing to reinforce it around the rivet holes. This was to prevent any spreading of the cracks in the casing around the rivet holes, and to create a stronger joint.

This took a while to get right, but it went together pretty smoothly.

Then, finally I could reunite the fan unit with the heater unit to make the thing whole again! Apologies for the blurry pics, my cellphone camera seems to have trouble with shiny plastic and a flash!

Compare this with how it came outta the car and I think you'll agree it's a small improvement.A LOT more durable now too!

Off away with work for a few days now, so will hopefully be back in the garage on Thursday or Friday to fit it all back in again and cet the front clam on! ABOUT BLOODY TIME!