As you all know, the Elan production started using bodies manufactured by S Bourne & Co (Plastics) Ltd of Nottingham, England.
These bodies are identified by:
An identification plate fixed to the vertical bulkhead in the engine compartment and is stamped with the body number
A grey pigment was used in the gel coat and resin, so that the engine compartment, interior of the bootlid and all glassed surfaces were grey in colour.
It is impossible to establish definitely how made Bourne bodyshells were manufactured, but due to chronic supply and quality problems, it is unlikely that more than 200 bodies were actually produced by Bourne even though the original contract was for 1000.
So where have all the Bourne bodied cars gone?
Please let me know if you have one of these cars. I suspect that many have been broken up but it would be fascinating to have an idea of how many still exist. I would be grateful if you would supply the body number from the bulkhead plaque. Sometimes the plaque is missing but two tell tale holes remain. In addition, please let me have from the identification plate the unit number which is scribed at 90 degrees to the chassis number and engine number.
Would really welcome responses to this question please
I know they (bourne) lasted into the mid 300’s - A man who bacame my friend via the lotus connection owned an S1 that he bought new in Texas -
It had the bourne tag on the firewall - It was also painted an Ivory white ( OEW maybe…)
I lived in the same town with him for 7 years and I don’t think the car left the garage once in that time… it had lost none of the bitza’s that make restoring the early cars a pain…
I believe that Frank has most (all?) of the early records but is missing the later Sprints. These happened to be the ones that were posted because he was being very gracious and answering peoples questions indivually. My guess is he saw where it was leading and stopped doing it as it was not his job to be the Lotus Historian. Frank said at the time that he was working on getting them all transcribed and that he did with the .pdf Link posted in my first reply) that is on his web page. He has your engine listed as LP 1182, there are other errors on it also like the month/day switch on some of them. 8552 lines for the Elan will do that, not including all of the other Lotus models that are there too.
50 out of the 908 lines in the spread sheet are blank except for the unit number from the begining to 3900, I wonder if these are shell replacement for accident write offs or 26r shells or what.
Brian,
You clearly don’t need that plate, I think you should donate it to me so that I can fit it to my genuine original 26R BRM Ian Walker Border Reivers Shapecraft 1972 Sprint.
FWIW looking at the engine list I bought engine #LP-7062LBA from Doug Fairchilds 63 OR 64 elan after it was crashed in 1983–but being a canadian car perhaps it wont be on the list —ed
I’ve just had a look at this and found my car. If there is a single “LC” invoice recorded rather than two separate invoices, I guess this means that it was sold as a fully built car and not a kit?
I think I’ll go out on a limb here and say that the bourne bodies alway had a at least one zero preceding its digits on the 26/xxxx tag.
It would seem from the six pages of Lotus records posted in this topic 438 is the highest body number recorded (with this limited data), after that the body numbers seem to be 3xxx which I would guess are the first of the bodies made by Lotus at Cheshunt factory. Thank you James for taking the time to post the page from lotus reacords. You have helped me and I think Eric will have a nice copy for his records.