Elva Courier MkIII Restoration Blog

 OK, these are some of the newest photos of the back end of the car, along with some older ones of the Lotus Frame,  I seem to be losing control over this blog little by little.  I wish I could caption each photo, but my ability to do that that seems to have been lost.   In these photos, you can see the back part of the fiberglass being painted from the underside first.  You can also see the transmission tunnel coming together and being painted.  

 The Mk IV windshield frame was also featured here, in the later pictures.

  I have even more good photos to catch up on.

I have been working on this car at various rates of speed for the past 5 years now.  Sometimes, there is a reason to push harder than others, sometimes there are serious impediments in the way.  This is one of those times when there is a serious reason to push and no shortage of impediments.  The next Elva Meet will be at Watkins Glen April 21-22.  http://www.racingarchives.org/

I have decided to go, to force myself to push once again for a deadline.  I don’t know if I can do it, but it is worth trying.  Here are some photos to bring y’all up to date on where I am today.

The race for April 21 is on!

I am trying to catch up on where I am today, but have not quite made it.  So here is an attempt to use some slightly older photos to fill in the gaps.

In these photos are a selection of things that have already been done, but not mentioned in the blog so far.  I have photos of the mounting bracket I made for the fuel cell, the various parts that were used to fix the old differential, like the new hardened axle, compared to an old one.  Fortunately, the gears in the diff were in extremely nice condition, so no work needed there, thank goodness.  I am also showing the bottom of the trunk floor area, and how much fiberglass work had to be done under there.  There is a recent pic of the pedal assembly being pre-fitted; although it is not quite done yet.  The dashboard is my next big project.  That, and the gaps between the body and the chassis at the rear bulkheads, . . .

I’m not going exactly in chronological order here.  This work on the firewall was actually done earlier, but it fits the story here anyway.  The firewall and engine bay looked absolutely horrible when I got the car in pieces.  I had the whole inner area sandblasted with plastic media so I could start from scratch.  But then,  because it was not going to be made into a street car anymore, except for an occasional drive, it would not need some of those extra holes, like for a heater, and other things.  Also, some previous owner seems to have thought he was going to switch it over to right-hand drive, and he cut a big hole in the right side of the firewall, which I had to fill in!   The work was far more laborious than I had ever expected, (what else is new) and so here are the highlights:

In my previous post, I showed how the whole chassis had to be dis-assembled one last time to be re-primed with several coats of epoxy primer.  In most of those photos, the chassis had no rear bulkhead.  Then in the last two photos, the new bulkhead was starting to take shape.  Here are a few more details of that process:

Really, I hope this is the last time.  This past summer (2011) I finally decided that everything had been properly pre-assembled well enough, that I could put the final coats of DP-90 primer on all the bits and pieces.  Damn, there are a lot of bits and pieces!  Individually painting all of them was more work than I expected, and took a lot longer than I’d hoped, but here we go: