Elva Courier MkIII Restoration Blog

Here are the photos showing the long process of putting green paint on it, bonding the body on, and putting more green paint on it, making and bonding the rockers and then putting more green paint on it.  In that order.

Well, I got side-tracked by Life getting in my way.  A year ago last Fall, my dear Mini Cooper died, or at least it needed more than a little bit of work. It needed a new transmission because in their infinite wisdom, BMW decided not to make the parts available to fix the transmission, they will only sell a new transmission for $4500. With 130,000 miles on it, my wife and I decided it was time to let it go, so I sold it. In that same decision to let the Mini go, we decided to put the time and effort into the Lotus Plus 2, so in the last year most of my time was spent in that direction. See photos below.  

I have been working pretty hard on the bodywork but the pictures don’t really show how much work it is.  I will try to add some photos here to tell the story.

In a much earlier post, I mentioned the problems I found in the right front fender area around the headlight.  Well, I just tore into it and took out all the wire screen mesh and bondo, but not much was left when I got it all off.  There was just a big hole where that corner of the car was supposed to be.  There was another problem, and that was the wheel arch was dangerously close to the tire; much closer than the other side.  Seeing as I am trying to make this a functional race car, I had better not overlook a potential place for tire scrub.  A certain amount of asymmetry in the body is characteristic, but the right tire was actually outside the fender on the right side and well inside on the left.  Other Mk III Couriers have this problem too, possibly because the fiberglass molds were getting old by that time and may have become distorted, who knows?

Anyway, I have put together this gallery to show the progression of rebuilding that corner of the car.  Hopefully the pictures speak for themselves.  I will just say that the dark brown goo you see in many of the  photos is epoxy mixed with phenolic microballoon, and what looks like pieces of wood, is actually balsa core.

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Well, I started by lowering my standards:  the event at the Glen would not require that the car be registered, and as it was not a real race, it didn’t even need to be race-worthy.  It just had to start and run and stop.  I figured making it green and doing a nice job of it might be a nice goal, but that too was a reach.

Every part of the car has been tested mechanically at this point, and it has been apart and back together so many times that I am pretty sure if I finish the paint job, it will run, stop and steer.  What I am learning is that even if all the individual parts worked on the bench, and were shown to work in car position, it does not mean they will all necessarily do that in car position all at the same time.

Several interesting problems emerged which hampered my completion:

1. The starter position interfered with the placement of the engine in the chassis.  This required the transmission to be removed and all the innerds placed into another bell housing.  So the whole transmission was re-built in the process.  The rear backing plate between the engine and the flywheel-clutch assembly also had to be changed.  Fortunately, I had one of those, but I did not have one for the street engine.  This was also made easier by the fact that the body is not yet fixed in place, and the engine hoist was in place.
2. The original MG engine-mounting brackets are at a different angle than the Elva chassis points meant to receive them.  On the right, side the needed change was easy to make (oval out two holes), but on the left side, the mounting bracket required significant welding to add material and move a bolt hole to a place which did not exist on the original metal bracket.  Then once that was done, I had to take it back apart to paint it.
3. The bolting flanges of the new wheels hit the new front brake calipers, just enough so that the car would not roll.  This will require spacers be made, but two washers under each lug are doing the job for now.
4. The full compression of the rear suspension (without the springs in place) was shown to cause the driveshaft to hit the new rear bulkhead at the top of the transmission bulge.  The interfering part of the bump was cut out and re-glassed to make it clear the driveshaft under any circumstance, such as the full compression of the suspension.
5. The new gear-reduction high torque starter didn’t fit between the distributor and the chassis, (at first), but I was able to make an easy adjustment to the mounting position (clock it over 90 degrees) to make that clearance.  Now it just interfered with the fiberglass inner fender well, right next to the battery box.   This led to more fiberglass cuts and re-glassing the area around the starter.  I still have not had a chance to smooth it out in the engine bay and re-prime the area.  It will need one more lay-up before the primer.
6. Finally, the engine was dyno-ed on the bench, last year, but the engine had never been in car position before, so I hadn’t been able to tell what the velocity stacks might run into.  It turned out to be the pedal box, right next to the accelerator pedal.  I am going to my engine guy’s shop later today to pick up a pair of shorter horns.

While 4 hours from home and 3 hours from the Glen, the Durango’s input shaft snapped, leaving me and the boy stranded in the middle of nowhere.  AAA paid to tow it to a Dodge dealer who offered to sell me a Jeep Liberty, which could finish the trip, or charge me $4,000 for a new transmission.   AAA then towed it halfway home on Monday and I had to pay the last 120 miles, as well as renting a U-Haul truck to bring the unfinished racecar home in the rain, (and snow).

A good time was had by all.

As most of you know, the original Elva Courier had 3-inch wide wheels, and a little styling cue called fender skirts, which like the tailfins, have gone away in recent years.  However, what this means is that if anyone wants to race an Elva Courier with wider than 4.5 inch wheels, (as I do), and they want the car to appear to have the original styling, they must go through this process.  I bought these flared fender skirts from Butch Gilbert, but then added another 1/2 inch of width using balsa core to make the wheels and tires clear the fenders even if both sides were pushed all the way up at the same time.  You guessed it, this was much more work than I had thought it would be!