Exige S1 Rebuild

[fzust]

Awesome!!!!!

[ggelise]

Fantastic. I can't believe how lucky you were to get one over before the ban! Amazing job! Thanks for sharing.

[Tuscan]

Originally Posted by ggelise

Fantastic. I can't believe how lucky you were to get one over before the ban! Amazing job! Thanks for sharing.

It wasn't luck, the government announced new restrictions that would be getting placed on imported vehicles... I decided at that point to sell my S1 Elise (which I'd previously sworn I'd never sell) to make the step up to the S1 Exige.... I'd always wanted one and I decided at that point it was now or never

[Vulcan Grey]

Awesome! Thanks for sharing.

This reminds me I need to get a ton done on my own similar rebuild project.

[Aedo]

Great to see it going back together!! This thread is really tempting me to start looking at buying a UK Exige to bring to Oz - the exchange rate is great at the moment!!!

And to echo everyone else - staggering work and great motivation for the rest of us

[OREEEgone]

Thanks for moving your rebuild over to this site. I'm glad that others will now be able to see the fabulous work that you do.

[LouieLaguna]

Love it...thanks for sharing.

[Tuscan]

Not much progress this week, been waiting for a few things to arrive.

Piper cambelt arrived this week and is now out with the engine. The head and pistons getting CC'd this weekend so I can work out compression ratio and decide whether to run the head gasket with the "saver shim" or not.

Tonight I just picked up the anodising I had done on the battery clamp and the radiator fan brackets I made up... looks a million bucks.... much like the rest of the car is beginning to

[Tuscan]

Right, a perfect, sunny, late-October Saturday! So what better way to spend it than NOT getting a tan from inside the workshop?!

This afternoon I begun shaping up the buck for the dashboard gaugepod. Of course I've done this before, but for the aborted single-gauge pod. This is for the new "MkII" design as I spoke about a few weeks back.

So first, take one piece of 4x4 (actually 2x 2x4s glued together in my case):



Use the previously generated SolidWorks model/drawings to cut out some paper templates and use them to figure out where material will be removed from. Take to the wood with a radial arm saw, a hacksaw and a coping saw and quite possibly several other kinds of saw:



Spend a few hours whittling away with a wood-rasp, sandpaper, a linisher and whatever else you have lying around and itl'll look something like this:





There's still a fair way to go on it, and I've over-cut some areas so they'll need to be built back up with bodyfiller and re-sanded. This will happen tomorrow.

Once I'm happy with the rough shape, it'll start getting finish-sanded and fitted in the dash (for accurate sizing).

I'll then lay a few coats of paint on to get it nice and glossy so that it makes a good mould-surface.

Let's see how far I get tomorrow.....

[Olive]

No Limit respect for your wonderfull job !!!!!

Olivier (from France).

[EliseAtLeast]

Originally Posted by Olive

No Limit respect for your wonderfull job !!!!!

Olivier (from France).

+1. This is real amazing. Glad that this S1 is in good hands.

[Tuscan]

Just got home (at 3am) and decided to try a cheeky test-fit. Good news is that it fits and the viewing angles are just as I'd hoped they would be. Gauges will be nice and visible

Fingers crossed that it'll look a little bit less conspicuous when it's trimmed up in blue Alcantara like the rest of the dash

So far, so good

Apologies for the dodgy 3am camera-phone pics!

[Tuscan]

After looking at the buck sitting in the dash last night, I decided I'd try to round off the left hand side a bit. Ideally i'td be totally rounded off but with the need to fit the LEDs there, that's not going to be an option. I decided to modify the LEDs position and make them radial with the gauge, instead of vertically aligned. Then I'd reshape things a bit and this is what I'm looking for (Click links for large pics):





I've started filling and reshaping the buck but it's slow going to get the shape just right.... stay tuned...

[Tuscan]

I said it would be slow.... and I was RIGHT!

It's just really been a day of slowly shaping, sanding, filling, re-sanding etc.... but it's getting here

I'll let the pics speak for themselves:

[Tuscan]

Right, well not much on the Lotus this weekend. Have a Monday trackday at the new Hampton Downs track tomorrow, so I've been prepping the GTi6 for some track abuse since the Exige quite clearly won't be ready for it. It's kinda sad that when I signed up for he trackday about 4-5 months ago, I was sure the Exige would be ready to début on the new circuit... something about best laid plans and all that I guess.

But today, I did manage to get a little bit done on the car.

First involved getting the new custom-made fan-mounts riveted to the radiator. Now in place and looking a million bucks:







I then set about getting the radiator mounted in the car, which turned my attention to the rad-fan. This looked particularly sad, so I decided to strip it for a bit of a check-over and clean-up.

Upon stripping, it became patently apparent that the fan, like the rest of the car had been pretty badly affected by the cess-pool of hydrochloric acid that is the UK. Here we can see the fan motor casing looking like an artefact from the titanic:







I immediately feared the worst, and while I knew it was working when the car was pulled off the road, I feared it mightn't much longer. After contemplating importing a new fan, I decided to investigate further. I pulled the motor apart and thankfully the ingress of cancer hadn't affected the innards. Bearings were still in good order and sealed. I slapped a bit of moly grease where appropriate (just to make sure) and sealed it back up.

I then set about tidying the motor up, first attacking it with the wire brush:




Then the primer:




Before finishing with several coats of fetching satin black:




The fan basket and blade assembly was then treated to a nice clean-up and a liberal coating of plastic restorer/protectant to help stave off the elements. This, reunited with the fan motor completed the process:





The fan was then tested and received two thumbs up from the fastidious bastard in charge (me).

I was then stopped in my tracks from further assembly by the great nyloc nut shortage of Nov '09. I then decided that it was late and that I had a trackday in the morning so it was best to stop arseing about with my wreck of a Lotus and get some shut-eye.

[VinceC]

Wow!

[Tuscan]

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!

[Tuscan]

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!

[Tuscan]

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!

[Tuscan]

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 ****. 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 ****ty 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.