Exige S1 over-winter Refresh

Exige S1 over-winter Refresh

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Esprit

Original Poster:

6,370 posts

282 months

Friday 21st December 2012
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mgbond said:
Enjoyed that read. Top marks. I have to say you handle he car well as I don't think the Elise/Exige is an easy car to drift.

Congrats.

Bondy
Haha thanks, yeah it's not the easiest car to hang out, it's quite snappy, but once you get used to it you can feed it a bit of angle and it responds well enough if you're awake smile

Esprit

Original Poster:

6,370 posts

282 months

Monday 25th March 2013
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Well it's been a little while but SEXIGE is still alive and kicking. I've not had much time (or cash) lately to do a whole lot with it.

It's had a slight metallic rubbing noise from the left rear wheel intermittently and while I initially suspected a knackered wheel bearing, it doesn't seem to be.

I've not had the space at my flat to work on the car and suss it out but hopefully I've the time and space to get to the bottom of it now. Whatever it is, it doesn't seem to be major, so possibly just a rubbing brake disc or something similar.

I did, however, manage to get the car all shined up for the Club Lotus display at the Ellerslie Concours. A good number of hours went in to clean it up and give it a good going over top to bottom. It was looking pretty sharp on the day and Club Lotus took out the club display award, which was a nice end to the day.



Since then, the car just sat under its cover at my flat as I got on with the other big thing in my life. This last couple of months I've been going through the purchase of my first house.

I'd been looking at buying for a while but with the market being so crazy, I decided to just stay flatting for a while and saving money, but in January a place came on the market that suited me perfectly and was just about in my price range. I decided to take the plunge and on Thursday I started to move in.

You know when you see a house and there's just something about it you love? You can't seem to put your finger on it but there's just something about it that just seems right. I got that feeling about this place.

Here's a couple of photos of the Exige squeezed into its new garage for completely unrelated reasons.









You can kinda tell by the previous owner's enthusiastically-laid rubber that it's just the right sort of house for a petrolhead!

Of course now I've got a mortgage, the fun-budget is a little more restricted but I still plan on tinkering with the Exige, although I'll have to be a bit more measured with how hard I drive it on track as I can't afford to throw money at it as much as I have done in the past.... still, at least I've now FINALLY got the room to do all the work I desire on it!




melvster

6,841 posts

184 months

Monday 25th March 2013
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Great update, that is an incredible garage plenty of room for more toys biggrin

pthelazyjourno

1,848 posts

168 months

Monday 25th March 2013
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Your garage looks bigger than my flat.

How depressing!!

Nice to see Sexige has a home!!

aagmsilva

11 posts

156 months

Tuesday 26th March 2013
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Man that is a garage for real petrolheads.

Space and tools already and ready.

Congratulations

minimalist

1,488 posts

204 months

Saturday 30th March 2013
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Can we now look forward to seeing you do up the garage?

It is big enough for a proper man cave. Big TV, some sofas, framed vintage racing posters, a pool table and a fridge and you are good to go.

Esprit

Original Poster:

6,370 posts

282 months

Saturday 30th March 2013
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Over time, yes... although we'll concentrate first on cleaning it up,painting the floor and then start getting in some kind of decorations smile

Esprit

Original Poster:

6,370 posts

282 months

Monday 13th May 2013
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Been busy with house/work stuff of late so not many miles put on the car.

I did, however, manage to track down the source of the grinding noise on the rear (I think) to a rear calliper bolt being sliiiiiightly too long and just touching the back of the brake disc when loaded up. A quick touch with the grinder sorted that out.

This last week, I got round to doing something I've been meaning to so for a while; resetting the ride-height and giving the car a full geo, as the handling suggested it wasn't ideal. I've had the rear suspension on and off a couple of times and while I had an alignment done not too long ago, it just didn't feel right.... so now that I have the garage space, out came the string!



As I suspected, it was a way out, so after several hours of setting up, measuring, adjusting, and repeating, I had it pretty damned close.

The reason for this? I'd been invited along to a trackday by my father as his group of mates was going to one with the Hawke's Bay Car Club at Taupo. My good friend Paul Aston was coming along too in my old Elise, so it was set to be a fun day.

After a foggy drive down, the day was just a perfect late Autumn day. Clear blue sky, little breeze and about 20 degrees. Lovely!

Paul and I were allocated into the fast road-car group, which put us out with a couple of 997 Turbos, a 996 Turbo S, an R8 V10, a couple of F430 Scuderias and a Ferrari F458, among others.

Despite being outgunned under power, SEXIGE acquitted herself well, clearly faster than everything else out there over a lap, even though sometimes the others were reluctant to let the little upstart past!

This was from the first session, and I've got more video to come, but this was the only one where I started from the rear of the group, in the others I tended to just lead out and leave the exotica behind. It's not every day you get the chance to dust off Scuds and 458s!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BNMBBQ2SSw

Managed to clock a high 1:42 laptime which isn't too bad... car has more in it though, especially since my rear tyres have long since given their best!

grenpayne

1,975 posts

161 months

Friday 24th May 2013
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Hi George, just wanted to congratulate you on a fabulous thread, thank you for writing and photographing it all. I don't normally have much to do with the Lotus forum (I'm normally in the Caterham bit) but after starting at page 1 some 4 hours ago (and as many cups of tea) I've just finished! I genuinely felt sick when you got to the bit about the oil fire! Your dedication and attention to detail is amazing and I'm delighted you've got to where you are after so long. The car looks superb and is a real credit to you.

Fair play to you as well to sticking with the K Series. I had my Caterham's 1.8K rebuilt last year, after an MOT test revealed that things weren't quite right. It's not the VHPD and was only running about 160bhp on throttle bodies, but cylinder No 4 (sound familiar!?) was way down on compression, with No 3 not far behind. Piston rings were found to be the most likely cause but opening the engine up revealed a catalogue of horrors from different weight rods to pitted valves to marks on the crank looking like it had been dropped on the floor during engine assembly. Like you I made the decision to stick with it (despite looking long and hard at Ford Duratecs) and now I have a really solid K series that produces good power and a great noise much like yourself. The final mapping was done on mine a few weeks ago and it's now going great with a really flat torque curve from 4000rpm all the way to the limiter.

I've bookmarked your thread now for the future and hope you and your Dad have some great times ahead with the car. God knows you deserve it smile

TVR Tommy

613 posts

224 months

Friday 24th May 2013
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Thats a great little Exige you have there. It looks like it handles very nicely and the sound of the k at full chat makes me miss my old S160, But that wasn't in the same sound league as your singing TB'd car.

After all those nightmares the car managed to throw at you, they must be long forgotten and forgiven by now?

Oh and not forgetting your garage! Bit small isn't? I can imagine you really struggle to find a place to put things! What I would give to have a garage/workshop like that.

All round well done and very nice!

Esprit

Original Poster:

6,370 posts

282 months

Sunday 26th May 2013
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Glad to see people are still getting something out of this thread from time to time smile

Other than niggles, the car is running superbly, and I'm very happy with it. It's as fast as I want it to be, and while I want to go faster, it will be with a car I build to go fast from the outset. Some of the speeds I'm doing now I really do need a full rollcage, and I must admit that I think my next one I shall build as a centre-drive.

Esprit

Original Poster:

6,370 posts

282 months

Sunday 1st September 2013
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Well it's been a couple of quiet months for the Lotus over here. I always use it little in the winter, and despite it being an unseasonably warm/dry one over here I've had a bunch of other things on my plate which have kept me otherwise occupied.

Now being a mortgage-slave, I can't really afford to abuse the Exige in the way I'd ideally like to, so I've decided that the Exige will become more of a toy than a track hack and will come out for the odd trackday here and there and also for some road fun. That way I can avoid breaking it and having to sell organs to get it fixed! smile However, I still have a track-fun itch that needs regular scratching so I've decided to go racing on the cheap, so a friend and I have decided to field a team for the 2kCup here in NZ (www.2kcup.com).

This is basically a class for cars valued and purchased for less than $2000, sub 2 litre standard, normally-aspirated road cars. The idea is to basically buy it and race it completely unmodified. Some small modifications are allowed, and any changes to the car are limited to swapping out factory-optioned bits. Engines must be 100% standard, rollcages and race-seats and harnesses etc are optional to try and keep costs down and the cars are all slow enough that they're not really needed anyway.

The sensible cars at the front of the field are SW20 MR2s and Honda Integra DC2s it would seem. Liking a challenge and to do things a bit differently, we decided to go completely left-field and contest it in a Mazda Lantis Type R... which is somewhat boat-like in comparison to the opposition! Our aim, however, is to have the best sounding car in the competition! Such a shame we have to run a stock exhaust system as it sounds hilarious with a straight-pipe!

When we picked her up, she smelled like an ashtray, had various bits spraypainted matte-black, had completely the wrong suspension fitted and even had the remnants of stockings stretched over the lights as makeshift-tints! Beautiful! We christened her "The Cockroach"





We set about tidying her up, getting it road-legal again (another series requirement) and sorting out the suspension:



We also dropped as much weight as we could legally do, by removing things such as the sunroof (as the Lantis-R was available without one), so I decided to turn my hand at making up a carbonfibre sunroof-patch by making up a fibreglass mould:



... and then using it to lay-up a carbon sandwich panel on top of, which turned out pretty passable for a $2k junker!



Initial track testing has shown that while we probably won't be in the hunt for the championship, we're about on the pace of the lead bunch and hopefully can have some good battles.... it's a laugh being on track and not having a care in the world about blowing it up or bending it! It means you can rag it mercilessly!



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVkEJH_RM2I

Of course, having the new garage makes it a hell of a lot easier to do this kind of project and not having to worry about storing the Lotus or having cars in the way of each other when you want to work on one or t'other is nice!

It's actually looking kind of emptyish at the moment as I've suddenly become the focal point for all my friends wanting to do jobs on their various machines!



Back in on SEXIGE, it's still running really well, although I've still got a weeping gearbox casing which will need sorting in the mid-term. Given that the box needs to come out, I've decided I'm going to save up and fit a lighter flywheel and twin-plate clutch since the engine in this kind of tune really deserves something a bit less ponderous than the standard setup, and because I've already had one single-plate clutch fail on me, my trust in it is a little dented. I'll get them sorted out and over here before I pull the box off and apart to get the porous casting sealed up, which should fix the leak. It's only an annoyance value as in traditional Lotus fashion, the leaks always make a hell of a lot of mess for very little oil!

The only other issue I've had recently is a case of running rich and a bit of a hot-starting issue where it's prone to flooding. After polling the sensors it seems that my TPS has gone, as last month I noticed it sitting at 14% throttle on idle, and while it's usually not that bad, a test drive today showed it to be sitting anywhere from 0.9% to 6.2%, which isn't right. I pulled the old one off and have a new one on the way to re-fit, which should hopefully save me the hassle in future of being stuck on a petrol-station forecort rapidly flattening my battery trying to fire it up!

TPS Removed:


And the offending item:


And the car as she sits now:




First day of spring here today so looking forward to putting some miles on her this summer and the odd track outing too smile

Edited by Esprit on Sunday 1st September 13:32

Esprit

Original Poster:

6,370 posts

282 months

Saturday 30th November 2013
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Well it's been a while since I've done a proper update.

Had the Exige out on track a few weeks back at the Club Lotus NZ twilight trackday at Hampton Downs. Had a couple of fun sessions, and despite me not driving it too hard and the brakes protesting a little (the discs are well due for replacement) it still managed to lap in the 1:14s easily, within a second or so of my best times.

On the way home the car started making a bit of a jangling sort of noise I knew all too well. I suspected that engine vibration had broken another manifold support bracket but inspection last weekend showed that the bolt that secures it to the block had come out and disappeared. It was about a 3 hour job to replace the bd because it's probably one of the least accessible fasteners on the whole car! With only minimally skinned knuckles I managed to sort it.

With that fixed, I was going to take the car up to the "Caffeine and Classics" monthly meet up in Takapuna. On the way up there though, I noticed the slight grinding/rubbing noise I occasionally get from the left rear was back and probably worse than ever. Everything felt fine though but I decided to go home. It's one of those annoying problems that you can't replicate on the jack just by spinning the wheel but a half hour of rolling the car back and forth in the garage pointed to it being the left outer CV joint making a little noise.

The CV joints were one of the things I didn't do in the rebuild, I simply cleaned out and re-packed them with grease as well as cleaning up the salt corrosion and painting with POR15, so with all the track abuse I've given it,it made sense that one was likely to be on the way out.

So, with a new CV joint here from EliseParts, I got to fitting.

Here's the old CV off the car and on the bench:



I was going to paint the new CV as I did the old one, but given the car doesn't see a lot of the winter running these days, I figured it'd stay looking okay as it was. It doesn't match the other side now, but I'll probably replace the right hand CV too before long as preventative maintenance.

It all went nice and without a hitch really, which is nice. I thought I'd post up some photos of the wheel well area so y'all could see how the finishing job I did has held up over the last few years. While the car certainly isn't a daily driver it's certainly done a number of trips away and a dozen or so trackdays in the last couple of years, and it's been about 5 years since I did a lot of the initial work on the wishbones etc and they've held up really well I think!







Just need to give everything a quick spanner check and torque up before I take it out for a test drive in the morning. The Club Lotus Christmas Breakfast is on in the morning and the show/shine, so I might head along there to test it out smile

Ron98

286 posts

155 months

Tuesday 7th January 2014
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Looking at going back to a Exige post TVR T350c let me know if your selling. (S1)