Restoration project and advice needed please
Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2014 3:46 pm
First post on here and a bit of a long one! ...
Ok so the story so far then! My brother and I have pseudo-inherited my fathers lotus ?lan plus 2s which he owned before I was born some 35years ago now! His health has somewhat failed in recent years and as a result he's pretty much lost interest in virtually everything including the lotus which I can't even remember being started in my lifetime! Some time around twenty years ago he did some work on it with one of his friends which was predominantly around the carbs from memory but when they started it, it only briefly ran and then died (my brother and I were at school at the time unfortunately!). At the time they thought it was debris dragged through into the carbs from the tank that they'd forgotten to drain down and it's been sat ever since. I haven't seen any letters from dvla for it either so I think it's possibly even disappeared off the system!
My brother and I decided to restore it for him in the hope that it may spark some interest for him in something again (very proud man that had a heart attack followed a few years later by a stroke and now struggles with even basic daily tasks - I'm sure any of you can imagine the kick between the legs that was for him).
First challenge was actually getting him to let us touch his (albeit rotten) baby which we eventually succeeded in by persuading him to let us move it to my unit for 'storage' - that in itself took several weeks of persuasion! We had already acquired a spyder chassis by chance at a lotus show we'd taken him to (some haggling presented a deal too good not to do) but after some thinking we decided to try and keep it fully original.
The body is now off and ready to be stripped down for full restoration inside and out and the original chassis has been gone over closely. It is possibly salvageable with a fair amount of welding but we came across an already prepped and ready original rolling chassis on eBay that appeared to be in good condition and ended up buying that (the cost outweighed the time and parts of restoring our one). It's actually from the same year as ours too which is even better! The only gripe with it is the seller has had a different 'rare' diff fitted (not too sure what though) and had cut the rear bars on the chassis to do it - where they've been welded back in the work isn't great so we're planning to cut them out fully and replace them with the ones from our original chassis.
The engine is also out and somewhat seized to say the least. We haven't had the time to strip it ourselves but a mechanic friend was willing to do it for us for a few hundred quid so it's in his workshop in bits at the moment. This is the part where I'm after some advice from anyone that's been patient enough to get this far and is kind enough to help! My brother and I have limited knowledge on these engines (we're mainly into modern jap-scrap, turbos and v8's!) so we're not too sure what our options are here. Received a message from the mechanic this morning saying the engine is basically 'borked'. All the cam shells were down to the minimum wear marks, couple had hot spots and abrasion marks and the main block itself is in a pretty poor state with the pistons from cylinders 1&4 out revealing a lot of rust and 2&3 currently stuck fast. At this stage in a jap we'd either brute force the pistons out and replace them along with re-sleeving the block (or possibly honing and oversized rings) or just replace the engine since it doesn't really matter on a modern-ish car. Obviously we want to try and keep the original engine so that rules out replacement but I'm not sure what our options are here. Have no idea whether it's possible to re-sleeve or whether the block has tolerance to be honed/bored out - it's older than I am! Lol!!!
Any help or guidance would be massively appreciated - would love to get it done and take him to a show in it at some point (he's unfortunately been told he's not allowed to drive any more by the doctors due to attention problems caused by the stroke but we're hoping we'll be able to let him at least have a 'pootle' about on private property somewhere).
Thanks in advance
Ben
Ok so the story so far then! My brother and I have pseudo-inherited my fathers lotus ?lan plus 2s which he owned before I was born some 35years ago now! His health has somewhat failed in recent years and as a result he's pretty much lost interest in virtually everything including the lotus which I can't even remember being started in my lifetime! Some time around twenty years ago he did some work on it with one of his friends which was predominantly around the carbs from memory but when they started it, it only briefly ran and then died (my brother and I were at school at the time unfortunately!). At the time they thought it was debris dragged through into the carbs from the tank that they'd forgotten to drain down and it's been sat ever since. I haven't seen any letters from dvla for it either so I think it's possibly even disappeared off the system!
My brother and I decided to restore it for him in the hope that it may spark some interest for him in something again (very proud man that had a heart attack followed a few years later by a stroke and now struggles with even basic daily tasks - I'm sure any of you can imagine the kick between the legs that was for him).
First challenge was actually getting him to let us touch his (albeit rotten) baby which we eventually succeeded in by persuading him to let us move it to my unit for 'storage' - that in itself took several weeks of persuasion! We had already acquired a spyder chassis by chance at a lotus show we'd taken him to (some haggling presented a deal too good not to do) but after some thinking we decided to try and keep it fully original.
The body is now off and ready to be stripped down for full restoration inside and out and the original chassis has been gone over closely. It is possibly salvageable with a fair amount of welding but we came across an already prepped and ready original rolling chassis on eBay that appeared to be in good condition and ended up buying that (the cost outweighed the time and parts of restoring our one). It's actually from the same year as ours too which is even better! The only gripe with it is the seller has had a different 'rare' diff fitted (not too sure what though) and had cut the rear bars on the chassis to do it - where they've been welded back in the work isn't great so we're planning to cut them out fully and replace them with the ones from our original chassis.
The engine is also out and somewhat seized to say the least. We haven't had the time to strip it ourselves but a mechanic friend was willing to do it for us for a few hundred quid so it's in his workshop in bits at the moment. This is the part where I'm after some advice from anyone that's been patient enough to get this far and is kind enough to help! My brother and I have limited knowledge on these engines (we're mainly into modern jap-scrap, turbos and v8's!) so we're not too sure what our options are here. Received a message from the mechanic this morning saying the engine is basically 'borked'. All the cam shells were down to the minimum wear marks, couple had hot spots and abrasion marks and the main block itself is in a pretty poor state with the pistons from cylinders 1&4 out revealing a lot of rust and 2&3 currently stuck fast. At this stage in a jap we'd either brute force the pistons out and replace them along with re-sleeving the block (or possibly honing and oversized rings) or just replace the engine since it doesn't really matter on a modern-ish car. Obviously we want to try and keep the original engine so that rules out replacement but I'm not sure what our options are here. Have no idea whether it's possible to re-sleeve or whether the block has tolerance to be honed/bored out - it's older than I am! Lol!!!
Any help or guidance would be massively appreciated - would love to get it done and take him to a show in it at some point (he's unfortunately been told he's not allowed to drive any more by the doctors due to attention problems caused by the stroke but we're hoping we'll be able to let him at least have a 'pootle' about on private property somewhere).
Thanks in advance
Ben