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Decided to get back to the heat shielding. This is quite important as the car is basically carbon with a dash of fibreglass :-) The exhaust is plasma coated so most of the heat should stay in the pipes but better to be safe than sorry.

I have already made the under and over shields for the exhaust - Aluminium patterns used to make carbon versions which were then skinned with Zircotex's Zircoflex III. However there is only a sheet of carbon between these shields and the car's electronics so I decided to add a layer of Zircoflex to this bulkhead, which is in progress.

Photos show the first section of Zircoflex added to the bulkhead and the top sections of the shield. The lower sections are still in place.





And I fitted the new pushrods. More clearance between pushrod and wishbone.

This one is for the "You're wasting your time, just have a dump before you race" brigade :-)

Whilst lifting the rack 6mm so the boot misses a cam support tube, I decided that it was an opportune moment to do a little weight shaving. Well, it would have been rude not to :-)

Apologies for the rubbish photo, no idea what happened there but must be driver error.

By removing 71gms the clamps with spacers now weigh slightly less than they did without the spacers.




One of the clamps fitted.

New damper pushrods finished. 40 minutes to make functional and another 40 minutes to make pretty :-)

:-) But this is preferable to “I won’t tighten this until I am sure I am not going to take it off again”. Did this around 40 years ago. When fitting twin DCOE Weber’s you have to wrangle the fuel pipes and throttle linkage as they want to occupy the same space. I left the fuel pipe banjo loose so I could adjust it as I fitted the linkage but forgot to tighten it and the obvious happened. Fortunately it went up as I pulled up outside a friend’s house in the middle of a party. People streamed out with beer mugs and washing up bowls full of water (including crockery). By the time the fire brigade turned up we had the fire out, or so we thought. The firemen checked the car over and discovered that it was still alight behind the heater unit. A very lucky escape. They said that they usually arrive at Lotus fires to find only the chassis left so I was very lucky that it happened where it did, otherwise I wouldn’t still be working on the car.

I know this is Kwik-fit but it is still informative :-)

www.kwik-fit.com/blog/why-are-my-tyres-cracking

Took most of the day, but finally completed the installation of the water and air hose clamps. When I first fitted the intake hose clamps they were slightly too large so the excess was waving about in the breeze and looked tacky (the next size down was too small) so I took them off and shortened them by around 30mm. Did this to all the hoses. Not only does it look tidier it removes the risk of catching myself on them. As an aside it also removed around 40gms but that is bye the bye :-)

Spent the afternoon in the garage doing little jobs.

Started to fit the new hose clamps.

Secured some wires.

Looked at issue with steering rack. The drivers side boot fouls one of the support tubes for the front clam. I can solve this by raising the rack 6mm by slipping spacers under the rack clamps. Quite a simple fix for a change and it also improves the angle between the rack and wishbones so less adjustment will be required when sorting out bump steer. Don't have any aluminium of this thickness and width so that is ordered. May have to add a little dent into the aluminium rad bottom hose as it is very close to the rack.

Also fitted rad cap.

£12 :-)

The trouble with taking so long on a project is that you re-visit and re-assess previous work, but this can have a positive side. A case in point are my rear inboard damper push rods. Whilst sorting out wheel specs I kept looking at these rods. As mentioned in my previous post I wasn't happy with their close proximity to the top wishbone, even with the mods.

The original rods were steel, but this was before I caught the weight reduction disease. I decided that they were too heavy so made carbon ones with aluminium threaded inserts glued in. Although the glue used was designed for such use I have never been 100% happy. Although most of the forces are in compression, if the glued joints fractured disaster could result.

So, I have decided to revert to steel push rods. However, as usual, not that simple as the original rods have different threads in them as, at some point, I changed the rod end specs to left and right hand threads so the suspension height could be adjusted in-situ.

So, at the moment I am sourcing 14mm OD thick walled tube as opposed to solid bar so I can keep the weight increase to a minimum and increase the gap between rod and wishbone (carbon tubes are 18mm).