Forty Years of Bad Road

The title was appropriate when I first conceived this thread (before I joined the forum) when I was writing up an account for the Website pertaining to my previous car (shown as my avatar and below). What was it (to be revealed later)?


Today my Elan is officially 60 years old, as shown in its original Log Book, though it wasn’t taxed for another week. It had left the factory as a kit in August 1964 and assembled by the original owner’s brother, who (a Forum member now living in Canada) owned it two years later. Unfortunately I have lost all the early photographs of my ownership, but they may turn up.


The registration mark ‘ARD 1 C’ is original but was especially issued from the Reading office for a reason I don’t yet know, as the first dated letter suffix was ARD 518C, or thereabouts; I’d always thought that they reset the number to zero with each new year letter but a book I bought (by Jonathan Del Mar) shows that normally they just continued with the front letters and numbers, as before, and slapped the year letter on the end when it became due. BTW ‘A’ was for 1963 but many offices, including Reading, never used ‘A’ or ‘B’.

At the end of the article (referred to above) I wrote something like “ I was over-driving it and with the reliability issues there was only one car on my shopping list: a Lotus Elan! What could possibily go wrong?” What indeed, but first buy one. I sold the incumbent car on Exchange and Mart (the eBay of the day) for a loss of just 10% after nearly four years ownership while a post-grad student (it was a graduation present to myself in 1965) so had little cash though a reasonable salary (4 times my 3 years student grant of £400 per year) in my first job in Teddington, SW London.

My first stop was a local Lotus dealer in Hampton Court where I drove a Green S3, I believe, and learned the first rule:, don’t move the steering wheel if you don’t want to change direction while changing gear! I hadn’t realised I did, but the previous gear change was slicker than the Elan’s. Too expensive, I was really restricted to a S2 and the second stop was JK motors somewhere around Enfield where I drove a “Special Equipment engine, sir” drop head, and recognising where I was I called in on an ex work-mate (from before I went to college). It started raining while I was there but, surprisingly, I worked out how to erect the hood (roof). It was a quick car but the rear wandered and when I shook a rear wheel, back in the garage, everything rattled! No deal, but they rang me at work to tell me they had jacked up the car and everything was tight! Now there’s a thing.

Then I visited Len Street Motors in Chelsea (?) and sat in a lot of cars, including an E-type, for the hell of it, but it was all too expensive. But the sales manager took me up floor or two and showed me a white S2, looking neat and tidy under the rain drops. Either then or later I took it for a drive: obviously a close-ratio gearbox ( which I was used to) explaining the slightly less sharp acceleration round Hyde Park etc but I liked it and bought it! What could possibly go wrong.

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Nice write up, Meg, thank you.

Its my birthday tomorrow. I shall be 11 years older than your Elan!

Tim

Happy birthday Tim

Thank you!

Those candles take some blowing out nowadays …

Tim

I’ll second that, and thanks for keeping us all informed of the production data for all these years.

I’ll post the next episode of the saga tomorrow, I hope.

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Greetings from Reading, Pennsylvania, USA! I recently was gifted a white 1967 S3 SE from its original owner. (I actually gave him money but it still feels as though I’m stealing a child.) I might chime in on occasion as you go along.

As stated, I had a good income but being short of capital planned to take out a hire-purchase agreement, but my parents, learning of it, dissuaded me and loaned the balance at an agreed interest rate. Len Street’s price was £ 875 (UKPounds which I’ll use from now on) and on 22 July 1969 I picked it up with 51,950 miles on the speedo. A work colleague, there were only five us in total, took me there in a Mk 2 Lotus Cortina (which had been the MD’s until he bought a Piper) and I followed him back to work via the Kingstone Bypass, a notorious highway, but I was delayed joining it and he’d floored the throttle, so although I’m not a competitive driver I was determined to stay behind him and found I was doing 105 mph as I entered an uphill curve! I wasn’t used to a quiet car, and as I braked the tail moved out, not a problem, and we arrived back in Teddington in good order.
A few days later, one headlamp failed to rise and the chief mechanic, George, came out to replace it, suggesting he might be able to get me a new fuel tank too, but I never heard any more about that. It was running on Cinturatos and at the weekend I streaked down to Brighton where I had just started dating my cousin Anne, whom I’d known since I was five. In the following weeks I visited many of my college and school friends, sometimes with Anne, and without her I drove north to Stone, just south of Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire to join my best friend Ben who had invited me on a week’s canal holiday with two other lads. To our surprise, there were very few pubs along the canal, I only remember one, but none of us drank much anyway and played bridge on board most evenings. I’d arranged with Anne that I’d meet her at Bangor station afterwards (my university town) so had a fantastic drive across to there and booked a b&b up the Llanberis Pass near Snowdown (the highest Welsh mountain). I’d spent three years with a view of Snowdon from my bedroom window but never scaled it. Before leaving for home we walked along the rocky path towards Snowdon for the first of many times.
It was a long drive back to Brighton on the South coast of England but I was familiar with most of it. Suddenly the engine died! I prodded around and decided it was a spark problem so took off the distributor cap and while feeling around something went ‘ping’ and it was alive again! It was dark by the time we approached Brighton on back roads when the dynamo failed, so to save battery I was driving on side lamps the rest of the way but got back to her tiny flat OK. I don’t recall how I started the car next morning to get to work but must have cobbled something together.
Ten days later, at the end of June, the core plug in the back of the head fell out! Somehow I managed to lever a new one back in place and unbelievably it stayed in until 2018 when I had it replaced! A short while later the battery fell over and dissolved the passenger’s seat belt! It was an Irvine lap-and-diagonal while the driver had a double harness, both fixed length i.e. not inertia reel belts.
On the way to the British GP, the one with Rindt battling Stewart all the way and outclassed 4WD prototypes, I felt the steering pull a bit during a slow period on the M1 and pulled off to find a front tyre almost off the rim; I changed it and carried on. Ben was at the race and I touted a spare ticket as my college companion, Roger, was preparing for his conversion to Judaism (it must have been a Saturday); he didn’t get to our wedding either for the same reason. Ironically, Ben could have used that ticket as he had just taken up with the lady that he eventually married.
A couple of days after that exciting event we listened, in bed, to the epic live broadcast of Apollo 11 landing on the moon!

In two months I had driven the Elan well over 2000 miles!

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As Eric Morcombe claimed after his rendering of Grieg’s piano concerto “all the notes are here, but not necessarily in the right order”. I didn’t keep a diary and my petrol/service record notebook was stolen, along with other valuables, ten years later than this episode. I now remember that my fellow lodger, Brian, used the spare GP ticket and the ticket touting was at a later meeting.

After a couple of weeks with only loose wheel nuts to bother me I checked out the tyre wear and was shocked to find the offside (right) tyre was hugely worn on the inside! Then I noticed that the wheel was leaning inwards and after jacking it up found that the front turret was rusted and broken at the base and leaning inwards! I went back to Len Street where George declared he’d never seen anything like it before”, and the manager told me straight away that the garage would not pay for the whole job, estimated at £160 UKP. I was naïve and should have looked at my purchase agreement, but anyway, got them to pay £100 UKP of it. I drove to Brighton one more time before handing it over and ended up paying about £100 UKP myself. I didn’t know much about Elans but did ask them to change any rubber bits, though I wasn’t thinking about doughnuts at the time. With an abrupt clutch action (an oiled up clutch plate found later) and 6-segment doughnuts it was quite a kangaroo and with the engine and gearbox being removed it would have been an easy task to fix it.

I asked them to fit Dunlop SP Sports all round, the aquajet tyre, and they were wonderful as had the SP41s been on the previous sports car, and I really got a feel for the Elan’s handling on the Sussex Down roads.
Brian, had lent me his Escort 1300 for a few Brighton trips and a few weeks later and as thanks for it I let him drive the refurbished car one evening: I drove out on a country road I didn’t know well and let him drive back; it was dusk and he entered a tight right hand chicane at a speed I wouldn’t have dared, and I was still admiring his skill when we hit the Armco barrier sideways on! Needless to say, he was highly embarrassed, having not remembered or identified the chicane, and immediately offered to pay for the repair which included a chassis change as well as the LH front suspension which took a lot of the impact, and the bodywork, which had absorbed the rest, needed restoration. I had a sore hip joint but only for a short while.
I rang Kingfisher garage, the Hampton Court one I had tested at, and they organised its repair (by a firm that had never handled a fibreglass car before, I discovered later) and asked for new rear dampers to be fitted and an overhaul of the rear callipers, and also requested that the bumpers and wheels be painted black. A couple of weeks later it was returned though with a new but unpainted front bumper, otherwise as requested. It drove as before and I continued my weekends in Brighton self-reliant.

Part of the journey, which was before the building of the M23 from London to Brighton, included the Crawley bypass near Gatwick airport which comprised a dual carriage way split by a series of multi-exit roundabouts and was great fun. One evening I approached a roundabout with a lone, slow car in the inside lane and as I braked in the outside lane he drifted out and forced me into the gritty gutter and caused me to skid into the roundabout; he then turned sharp left into his exit, no signal of course, and looked back at me saying slowly: “Keep death off the road”! Ah well, we all have our opinions.

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Ben had been living in Henley-on-Thames but moved north, where he met Lois, and we travelled up the M1 to stay with them for a weekend. After following the 90 mph traffic on the way home I pulled off soon after the M1’s terminus as the oil level was marginal and its temperature was also 90. I had fitted the gauge to monitor the warming up temperatures before driving hard, as I had on the previous car, and possibly I had fitted an oil pressure warning lamp at the same time as the plastic tube to the pressure gauge had fallen off on a previous excursion, far from Brighton, and we had had to abandon the car. No mobile phones in those days! The recovery garage fitted a steel tube rather than plastic, which created its own problems, and eventually I replaced it with copper brake piping.
I had fitted both the gauge and lamp in the dashboard in a sympathetic manner (I believe), as shown in the picture below (posted in another thread recently). The sensor bulb of the gauge poked through a modified sump plug though decades later it had its own socket on the exhaust side and showed a higher temperature than before! A reward is that my Elan’s crankshaft hasn’t needed to be reground yet though it hasn’t saved the bores.

On one of the Brighton trips I noticed that the car changed direction as I change gear accelerating away and deduced a wheel bearing needed changing, another job for Kingfisher and my parent’s repayment was getting erratic.
I’ve just remembered that I have a chart (graph paper) intended to show the history of major part’s replacements (1 mm horizontally representing 1,000 miles) which shows that the doughnuts were changed before I bought the car and the ring-gear and starter barrel were changed before 3000 miles had elapsed, I had had several push-starts and didn’t have the facilities to do it myself.
My job was designing electronic circuits to interface with small microwave (radar) modules as part of a series of security products to detect intruders and speed-meters for police and other uses, a significant one being for hovercraft, specifically the enormous SRN4. As a testing ground I used to take prototypes to the Chertsey by-pass, a fast dual-carriageway, and it worked perfectly, clocking a Porsche at 84 mph once, and giving me a lifelong ability to judge speeds by eye. More than a year later another of the lodgers, a girl, and I were chatting about cars when she said she had never travelled at 100 mph. I wasn’t trying to impress her but simply replied that I could change that for her, and she agreed. So we drove up to the bypass and I floored the throttle. We reached 100 at the braking point for our exit and the moment I touched the brakes something changed and I realised that the engine had stalled! There wasn’t anything obviously wrong, once we had got out of danger, so we walked the couple of miles back home. Strangely, it was a work day and lunchtime (why was I talking to her) so I picked up some cash, a rope and a nearly empty toilet roll (to clean up with) and one of the staff (the firm had grown) drove me back to the Elan and towed it back. I had determined that the distributor wasn’t turning because the drive pinion had broken in half! The new pinion had to be drilled for the retaining rivet so I was soon back on the road. But why had it broken and where were the three £10 notes I had put in my pocket?

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Great stuff Meg! Can’t wait to read more!

Thanks Ben, I had wondered whether anyone was reading it!

I’m a little disappointed that no one has offered an identity of “the previous car” though I was assuming that the few people I have told in PMs aren’t going to, so here’s a slightly more revealing view of it, and also a more artistic one of my best friend Roger, who took the main shot, at the same place on his 600 Norton.


Back to the script: Inspecting the distributor before refitting it I noticed that the whole of the main body showed little blisters from impacts inside, level with the square platform with the timing weights on it, and a small roundish lump of metal fell out. I had noticed that the rotor arm with the rev limiter had lost the little peg of metal used to keep it in line with the rotating shaft was missing, not that it seemed to matter, and this lump seemed to be the little lump which fell out. So, it seem that it had fallen through the contact breaker plate and during my high speed run had been swept up and kept getting between the weight plate platform and the distributor body. Eventually it jammed the plate and the pinion shattered!

A little later I realised that this morsel of metal was the cause of my breakdown coming back from Wales: it had shorted out the contact breaker spring and the “ping” was when I dislodged it and the engine then restarted!

Back at work, now comprising six people, a vigorous Managing Director John who had been in the Australian Olympic rowing team years back and who knew Graham hill etc, his secretary Jane a tall debutant shacked up with the surgeon who had restored her face after a car accident, two other directors Warwick and Tony with higher degrees (Phd and MSc) specialising in Microwaves/radar, myself designing the operational and processing circuits (nearly all individual transistors, few integrated circuits let alone microchips) and experienced small-production manager Arthur, a fully qualified carpenter! We also had a weekly pair of cleaners come in, salt-of-the-earth, and one day the lanky man exited the men’s toilet with his jaw hanging open, carrying a used toilet roll (a cardboard hollow cylinder) from which he slowly pulled out three ten pound notes!

“Hey,” I exclaimed, “They’re mine!” “What are they doing inside a f…king toilet roll?”

I had put the notes in my pocket, in a hurry, and then stuffed the toilet roll in the same pocket engulfing the notes, so it all ended happily after all. He wouldn’t accept any reward, lovely bloke.

Probably well out of time sequence there was another episode on the bypass, benign this time, when I decided to investigate the erratic brakes which had been pulling for some while. I confirmed that under normal conditions the car pulled to left needing quite a lot of correction and under very heavy braking, for which I needed a lot of speed it would eventually flip round the other way! So with Arthur’s help I raised all the wheels and slowly pressed the brake pedal while he went round spinning the wheels. Firstly neither of the rear brakes worked at all and rotated all the time while the right-front was very late before dragging a bit. On the road the left front did all the braking until it ran out of grip leaving just the right side one pulling the car round the other way!

I stripped the brake callipers and both rear pistons were rusty where the chrome had cracked and so were the front right; so much for Kingfisher’s overhaul during the second chassis change but I was too dumb to protest as I should have done. As it happened, that week a private advert somewhere in the press was for solid stainless steel brake pistons, so I rang the number and ordered a set of rear pistons, and they are still in the car!

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The front end of the previous car looks a lot like a type 14 Elite but I’m not aware that any were made with open tops. Am I close?

I’m afraid not, Ben but it’s probably why I got away with it for so long! It is contemporary with the Elite but isn’t a Lotus and was a sports/racer from another racing car maker and had, in fact, been raced. There were a couple of them racing at this year’s Goodwood Revival.

BTW The £30 UKP of the last few postings has to be put in the context of its value in 1970, considerable, and almost equal to a week of my salary, so in today’s value probably £500 UKP! I did carry quite a lot of cash in those days before credit cards, though I am shocked to realise just how much.

Looks like she goes. Elle va. Elva.

Spot on, Elva Courier!
Here’s an article published on the Elva web site in 2010 (which may not still be available there) about my ownership.
I’m sorry I haven’t posted recently, I haven’t had the time to piece together the next period.
A Tale of Two Chitties.doc (1.3 MB)

Having checked that this downloads correctly I noticed that I didn’t actually write “What could possibly go wrong?” after declaring my intention to buy an Elan; I missed a trick there!

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What a brilliant story, thank you for posting that.