Inner wheel arches

[Dieschelan]

Hi

What’s the original colour for the inner wheel arches? Black or the car colour? Is for an Elan s3.


Cheers

Diego

[nmauduit]

my bet would be unpainted...

[1owner69Elan]

On my S4, original color inside the wheel arches was body color. In my case Cirrus White with a generous coating of dirt as shown in the picture. The quality of the original finish not particularly good.

This was similar to the underbody finish in the boot area. Almost an afterthought, as a rough overspray:

Subsequent to this, I have painted the inside satin black, like the original engine bay. But, the whole car has now been resprayed in BRG. The dark BRG would have been OK inside the wheel wells and not showing dirt. The dirty white was rather unattractive.

IMHO, the issue of the inner arch color could be viewed in the same way the undersill black strip color is handled. For a light color car - black. For a dark color car, OK to be body color or black. The inner wheel arch is not an area that you particularly want to draw attention to as it is typically just going to be dirty as well as not really complementing the finished curvaceous Elan body..

[Andy8421]

I had understood that the front wheel arches were painted in underseal / stonechip to avoid stones thrown up by the tyres hitting the underside of the wings causing star crazing on the top of the wings.

Andy.

[pharriso]

Stolen from here:

ElanBodyOnForklift.jpg (93.78 KiB) Viewed 981 times

[Andy8421]

Ahh, tough to argue with that picture.

I did a bit of digging, as I was sure I had seen reference to underseal on Elan front wings. 'How to restore fibreglass bodywork' by Miles Wilkins has the following comment on page 23:

"Stone chips, especially under wheel arches will give front panels and top surfaces of wings a starry look as gel cracks appear through the paint. Lotus Elans and Europas are famous for this. After repairs, underseal the underneath of the wings and this reduces further cracking to almost nil."

I guess it is a question of choice whether to go with originality or durability.

[Elan45]

And then paint body color over the underseal.

RLS

[Geoffers71]

I used Gravi-Tex plus by U-Pol to paint under the wheel arches of my S2. It's specifically made to protect against stonechips and is overpaintable. It came in white, which suited me as my car is Cirrus White, but as it can be painted over that's not a problem. It probably comes in black too and maybe other colours. I still have a full bottle of it left over if anyone is interested

[Bigbaldybloke]

Based on my Plus 2 which has had a body off complete respray, I’d say the original colour was bare fibreglass with a liberal amount of body colour overspray, but not fully covering the whole wheel arch area.