Lotus Elan and Lotus Elan Plus 2 Forums

JJ66 wrote:Hi there NYK,

Your car is looking fantastic, and very nice door gaps! I will be rebuilding my door hinges soon to try and achieve somewhere near to what you have done with the fit. Main reason for writing is to ask if you are going to fit the front screen yourself, and is it a bonded screen? I am going to need to change screens at some point and have read various comments about it being quite tricky, so it would be good to hear if you have any tips.

Regards, Jonathan

Thanks for your comments Jonathan. I was quite lucky as the door fit was pretty good and did not require much effort, the front of the car was very different with much work required to get the headlamps, bonnet and side/indicator lights fit looking good. My screen is an earlier rubber fit type and although I have fitted screens many, many years ago I will have it done professionally. The paint shop who did sprayed my car have said the mobile screen fitters they use are very good, it remains to be seen how good,
Regards
Nic

Hi Nic, OK, so your screen is more conventional, thats good! Make sure those mobile guys take care though, the roof pillars aren't as strong as modern cars!

Your front end looks superb, I can concur that the fit of the front side lights and headlight pods is often not great on a standard car, but the picture above looks really good, very crisp. Its going to be a good looking car and a lot of us will be keen to see pics of the finished article!

Good luck in the last stages, Jonathan

Your bonnet gaps and particularly the light pod gaps are fantastic, how did you get them so good?

I have just been doing this on mine and on one pod I had to reposition the outer pivot point as the pod was cocked in the hole. Not an easy job! It's now a lot better but not as good as yours.

Dave

Donels wrote:Your bonnet gaps and particularly the light pod gaps are fantastic, how did you get them so good?

I have just been doing this on mine and on one pod I had to reposition the outer pivot point as the pod was cocked in the hole. Not an easy job! It's now a lot better but not as good as yours.

Dave

I needed to reduce the bonnet gap by about ¼” all round, I did this simply by bonding strips of fibreglass all the way round, then filler to finish. I used West Systems epoxy in place of resin for all fiberglass work, which incidentally included a new front end (back to mid wheel arches).
On the light pods, given they are a very rigid structure I used David’s P40 fiberglass paste to build up gaps and again filler to finish. Like you I had to remove and reposition the bobbins on one of the pods as the whole pod was just too low. The sidelights were just faired into the body using filler.
It did take quite a bit of work, but I really hate poor shut lines and badly fitting panels, I also don’t really like doing fiberglass work, I wonder why I bought a Lotus!