Lotus Elan Central

A few of you now know part of the reason for my recent trip to San Francisco: looking at another Elan. I hadn’t mentioned too much on the board because I wasn’t 100% sure I’d be getting it, but things worked out fine and the car is now home with me. Had something not worked out, the other reason for the trip was a belated anniversary getaway with my wife which was very nice. I had round trip tickets just in case and we had a wonderful weekend independent of the car. Along with sightseeing, we were able to meet up with some Elan owners for brunch. Very cool.

http://lotuselancentral.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8658

First and foremost I want to give great big thanks to Ekapol who took the time to check out the car for me before I came out. I had a decent idea from the owner what the car was like, but Ekapol was able to verify everything, take the car for a drive, and wrote up a huge description for me on everything he saw. I felt like I knew the car before I saw it in person. Ekapol is a perfect example of how friendly the people on this forum are and willing they are to help. It’s one of the reasons I like having the Elan so much. Thanks again – I owe you big time!

I have another thread about the cross-country trip, which was incredible.

http://lotuselancentral.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8846

While the car isn’t the most comfortable thing for long trips (the stock seats are a bit lacking), it does have a fairly large amount of driver and passenger room. Despite the fact I’ve now spent 3 nights in the car, I don’t recommend it!

The main purpose of getting the car is as a project. I will likely not keep it as long as “Track Elan”. Rather I’ll fix it up, use it as a jig to make some intake and exhaust parts (let me know what you want) and possibly a turbo kit, and have a little fun as now the whole family can go Elaning. The car is multiple shades of red and orange and pink with a serious clearcoat peeling problem, though it does look good in pictures. The engine runs strong, but shows signs of oil and coolant leakage. Nothing too serious as fluids were fine the whole trip home, but the head gasket and all other seals will be checked. The interior is quite dirty. It appears it was left out numerous times with the top down as there are leaves and dust all over, however no signs of water issues. No big deal, as it will just take some detailing time.

Apart from eventually getting a full paint job, my boys and I are going to clean the engine start taking a few things apart today to give it a serious once over. We’ll make a list of things we want to change, clean, or otherwise update in the months to come. For example the heat shields will be coated with Jet-Hot and I may replace most of the fasteners with stainless hardware. I’ll take pictures of the whole adventure and post here as I go.

If anyone can...the Meyers can.

Go Dave!

Pleasure is all mine Dave. I'm sure Peely will turn out to be one of the nicest Elan.. soon. She's now in good hand.

NICE!

I like the color

Let the fun begin

lol Its looks lovely in the photo! I quite like those wheels too.

Nice one

Cheers

PaulN

Looks very nice........especially the wheels. You'll have to provide the specs on the wheels whenever you get a chance

Dave M wrote: use it as a jig to make some intake and exhaust parts (let me know what you want) and possibly a turbo kit,

Very interesting Dave, chrome intake pipes ( or pipes that could be chromed ), would be of particular interest to me ( & others, i think ? ), & turbo kit ?, would you like to elaborate please ?.

Wish you good luck with the car !

Paul - the finish of the intake piping I'm thinking of would be similar to the pieces I currently have in my car. They are Jet-Hot coated which is a very durable, high-temp finish. In this case, I'd use the Sterling finish, which is not quite chrome, but very shiny. Jet-Hot also has other colors that I can offer as options, or I could paint them about any color.

Project Peely is moving along slowly, but I have tracked down a coolant leak and have the front end apart making sure the radiator and cooling fans are just right. One of the fans appears to have a cracked shroud, so I will either fix it, or get a new fan. Possibly even a new set of fans - we'll see.

In the meantime, I did have fun with one of the first "fixes": tuning the stereo. I'm an old car stereo geek who used to compete in IASCA here in the states. That's the hole I threw all my money in before the Lotus came along. I still have an AudioControl RTA that I play with from time to time and this seemed like the perfect opportunity.

Peely has a pretty fair system to start with. A Nakamichi head unit feeding a set of amps. One is an Alpine V12, the other I'm not sure yet - it's buried under the driver's seat and I haven't taken the seat out to clean yet. There is a AudioControl Three.1 as the crossover mounted in the glove box. For separates it has two sets of Pioneer Premier 5 1/4 and tweeters. The front tweeters are in the A pillar nook to the top of the door. You can see the rear tweets cross-firing, mounted behind the seats. Two Boston Acoustic 8" subs round out the system.

The stage is OK, but clarity is quite good. After a while trying different EQ settings, I found a decent compromise that only leaves a little hole in the 3K range. You can see the curve I ended up with below in one of the pics. Overall, a pretty darn nice little system. I was pretty impressed after finishing up and sitting back to listen to a few favorite CDs. We even threw "The Planet Kripton" in for a quick SPL test. Not bad considering the gains weren't turned up and that it's a convertible! I'll see what flexibility the amps have once I get more of the interior apart and try to trace how everything is wired to do a schematic - a thing we always did for competitions. Only something a geek would care about though!