Restoration of a 1967 Lotus Elan

Fortunately, this is one lesson I learned with no nasty cost associated with it. When I purchased the car, the finish on the dash was checked and needed refinishing. I ended up storing the dash in an un-heated/cooled attic for several years. When I got the dash out to refinish, the finish had turned almost black, presumably from the heat in the summer.

DIRTY

One of my goals with this car was to do as much work as possible myself. I sandblasted the chassis, all suspension components, all the little metal brackets that were rusty, air cleaner, etc. This is a nasty job! I performed the work outdoors with a simple siphon blaster connected to a 4 hp / 20 gallon air compressor. After I had most the work done, I upgraded to a 5 hp / 60 gallon unit which I found out was really the size needed. The smaller unit forced me to frequently wait while the air pressure built back up. The best media for me was white silica sand - very small and uniform grains. With this you must wear a good filtered air mask! I also always wore long sleeves, gloves, and a blast hood.

CASSETTE

The most costly mistake I made on the restoration of my car pertains to the water pump. I rebuilt the engine in 1987. Due to cost considerations at the time, I rebuilt the standard water pump with a rebuild kit. The unit was assembled correctly and with care. When I finally finished the restoration and started the engine for the first time in 1999, everything seemed to be fine during the initial running in the shop while I adjusted timing, carbs, etc. Then I took the car on its maiden voyage to the gas station and back (about 2 miles). When I returned, the water pump was leaking out the weep hole. My conclusion is the o-rings did not hold up to being in a stagnant engine for that many years and probably dried out. It is a big pain to have to remove the pan and head to rebuild the water pump, so when I was faced with this issue, I opted for a cassette water pump conversion from Dave Bean. I wish I had spent the money initially!

MICROMETER

This lesson was learned on an MGBGT that we used to autocross before building the Elan. However, I certainly applied what I had learned when building the engine for the Elan. The story starts in about 1982, when I was restoring the MG for autocrossing and pulled and rebuilt the engine. I asked around about reputable machine shops, picked one associated with a performance parts shop, and took the block in for machine work, including an align bore. My goal was to blueprint the engine to obtain maximum performance and reliability from the engine. At the end of about three months, I had the car back together and commenced driving it daily and autocrossing on occasional weekends. The car ran well, but seemed to have lower oil pressure at idle than I remembered. After about 10,000 miles, on the way to work one morning, terrible noises started emanating from the engine and I was forced to pull over and tow the car home. The engine came out, was taken to a new machine shop who an autocross friend had real good luck with, and the problem was explained. They were asked to check the block and make sure it was good before doing any work. I was assured the block was fine, reinstalled the engine, and about 10,000 miles later, I was on the starting grid at a Pro-Solo in Texas when the engine let go again. Both times, I had spun a rod bearing. I should add here that both times I rebuilt the engine, I used plasti-gauge to verify bearing clearances and nothing seemed amiss. By now, I am quite the unhappy camper, so I decided it was time to take matters into my own hands. I went to the local discount tool place and purchased telescoping gauges, vernier caliper and two sizes of micrometers. I took every reading I could think to take on the block and discovered the front main bearing was .01 inches out of round! Maximum bearing clearance was supposed to be less than .003. The deviation was on the horizontal plane, where plasti-gauge could not detect it. Apparently, the original align bore had been bungled! So, armed with all this information, off I went to a third machine shop with the best reputation in the area for performance engine construction. Everything was explained. I told them I had another block that I could build if need be, but would prefer to build the original, if it could be made a good block. I explained I didn't know how much they could do with machining operations. They called and said the block was fine and I could pick it up, as the machine work was done. I took the block home, miced it again, and it was still way out on the number one main. Needless to say, they machined my other block at no charge. Now, if I am going to have machine work done on a block, it gets measured by me before and after!

KNOCKOFF

When I was restoring the car, due to the amount of rust removal I had gone through, I was careful to properly lubricate everything on assembly. When I finally go the car assembled and made the first trip across town, I heard a funny noise and something seemed amiss in the front suspension. I stopped and checked and discovered one of the front wheels almost off the car. I found two of the drive pins (knockoff wheels) on the ground! I reinstalled the pins and remounted the wheel, using borrowed tools, and headed for home. I made it about 4 miles and the same thing happened again! This time I used Locktite green on the pins and trailered the car the rest of the way home. I then pulled the manuals and started studying, trying to figure out what was going on, fearing I had installed the hubs on the wrong sides of the car. After a while, I discovered the warning in the shop manual to NOT lubricate the knockoff threads. I had used anit-seize on them to protect from rust. A good cleaning with Brakleen and clean rags solved this problem.

After the above instance, I had no further problems with drive pegs and knockoffs until I installed 225/45 Hossier autocrossers on 9" rims. At an autocross early in 2002, after competing in a couple of earlier autocrosses with the same setup, I completed three timed runs and then lined up for my fourth run. When the starter motioned me forward, I released the clutch and went nowhere! Shortly thereafter, the starter advised me that my knockoff had just fallen onto the ground. An examination revealed all the drive pegs had come out - we later found them scattered all over the course and paddock area. I turned to my son, Brock Ivers, a mechanical engineer for a solution and he came up with a very elegant and simple solution that has held up well throughout the remainder of the autocross season, incluing a track day at LOG. I really like my knockoffs and did not want to give them up for sticky tires! The problem only occurred on the rear wheels. The front hubs have had the stock pegs Loctited in with LocTite 609 (green) and have given no trouble. The problem with the rear wheels is that they are the driven wheels. The peg holes in the wheels are larger than the pegs and allow a bit of lateral movement. Even though the knockoffs were on tight, the extra sticky tires was creating a slight wiggling effect under hard acceleration and deceleration, leading to the pegs falling out. If you examine the photo of the back of the wheel, the gray coloration is indicative of this wear. My son's solution involves machining a slight recess in the front of the hub around each peg hole and making new pegs with a lip that fits into this recess. The new pegs are inserted from the front of the hub and the lip is trapped between the wheel and hub. The peg is threaded and clamped to the hub with a washer and nyloc nut. The pictures below will show the solution.

IGNITION

When restoring this car, I decided to make a number of changes to the ignition system. I changed the battery polarity to negative ground, installed an MSD 6T electronic ignition with separate electronic rev limiter module, installed a higher output coil, and changed the points to an Ignitor hall-effect trigger. After getting the car running, the tach would not register properly, bouncing around, and generally showing about double actual RPM. I sent the tach off and had it converted from a current trigger to a modern voltage trigger. When the tach arrived and was installed, it would not work. If I laid the tach on a towel in the engine compartment with jumper leads to appropriate points, it appeared to work. This is when I started pouring over all the instruction manuals looking for what was wrong. The MSD manual said I should use spiral wound resistance wires to avoid possible interference with the tach. I thought I had done this, but when I removed my distributor cap, I discovered I had used the only 7 mm plug wire I had, which was solid core. Off to the speed shop I went to buy the proper wire, only to discover all spiral wound wire comes in a minimum size of 9 mm. The 7 mm wires just fit the stock side-entry distributor cap. I used a Dremel tool and a chainsaw sharpening stone to enlarge all the holes to accept the 9 mm wire. My tach now works fine with the electronic ignition. My MSD units are mounted in the nose of the car on the bottom. Since they are mounted on shock isolators, they are above any moisture that might accumulate there.