4/28/06 It's been 5 months since I worked on the Europa. I went to open my neighbor's garage and I again didn't remember which button on the 3 button garage door opener she gave me opened the alley side and which button opened the house side. So once again I was greeted by Louise's two young pit bulls. Luckily for me, I had found out over the winter that they were just two very happy, friendly 75 lb pups. Unfortunately for me, they don't get out very often so at their first glimpse of an open door to freedom they sprinted. It took about 10 minutes for my son John and I to chase them down and shoo them out of a half dozen other neighbor's yards and herd them back into their own back yard. With tails wagging 100 mph and slobber drooling out of their mouths, they accepted their return to captivity.
John and I moved the Europa body out of the way and rolled the engine/trans/chassis combo onto my trusty, rusty trailer. Someday I will have to do a restoration on my 1977 trailer. It's almost old enough for me to consider working on it. Actually the trailer gets updated every so often by people borrowing it from me. Paul Quiniff borrows the trailer often so one day at work he got tired of the ugly rusty orange paint so he blew a quick coat of school bus yellow on it. Looked pretty good for a while. A couple years ago Scott Scherwan borrowed the trailer and put his 914 Porsche on it to take it up to our track day at Blackhawk Farms Raceway. Well, he hit a big pothole coming out of a toll booth and busted a leaf spring. We had it towed back home and Scott popped for a pair of new leaf springs for the old beast. Couple weeks ago Bill Greenwald borrowed the trailer and put in all new wiring and lights. I guess he didn't like the fact that only a few of the running lights and nothing else worked. Hey, anyone else want to borrow the trailer? It could use some brakes and maybe another paint job.
So spring had sprung and I had spent the last weekend pulling my Sea-Ray boat out of the cottage garage. Had to use Vaseline on the door openings to squeeze it out - real tight fit. The piers, boatlift and Sea-Ray were now in the water so I now had an empty 1 car garage. Now a one car garage may only hold one American car or a boat if you really squeeze it in, but a one car garage becomes a two car garage if the cars are of the Lotus variety. So for my summer project (when I'm not out on the water), I now had the Europa sans body in the garage next to my regular Sunday morning driver - my 1963 Elan S1. As it turned out, the first weekend up at the cottage turned into a very rainy two days. It poured steadily from noon on Saturday until well after when I left on Sunday afternoon. No boating for me. My sons had a fishing tournament on Saturday but they dressed for the weather and didn't mind the pouring rain as they fished alongside the other 99 boats out on the Chain of lakes. What they didn't like was that they didn't catch any fish. They only fish for Muskies and those buggers are not easy to catch.
So anyway, I jacked up the engine/trans/chassis onto a couple of milk crates, turned on some tunes and started the disassembly of mechanical bits. Even though this is the newest Lotus I have ever worked on, it is still 33 years old and that's old for mechanical bits that have never been disassembled before. One thing in my favor was that the English anti-rust program comes in the form of oil seepage. Engine oil seeps out of various engine nooks and crannies and coats the entire back half of the engine/trans/chassis assembly with an 1/8" inch coating of black goo. The first time you take a wrench to a part, the black goo leaps off the car and finds its way to a cozy spot under your fingernails. Later on when it's clean up time, no amount of GoJo and aggressive application of a scrub brush will remove all of that goo. You can get most of it out, but for days you will look like you have applied eyeliner to your fingernails. Maybe that's the secret ingredient they use for toe fungus medicine. I hate those disgusting ads and commercials for whatever that product is. Maybe it's just old Lotus oil. No virus, mold or fungus could live through a coating of old Lotus oil.
Some of the bolts came off pretty easy. Some required a little leverage. All I had was a set of small sockets and my $10 set of Chinese wrenches. This being our cottage, I didn't remember to bring up my tool box of big ratchet wrenches and breaker bars. What I would end up doing is place the cheapie wrench on the bolt and then slip a 1 inch cheapie wrench over the small wrench to use as a breaker bar. Kind of an extension for the little wrench. Only stripped one bolt so far.
This is the first Europa that I have stripped down to its complete nakedness. Most of the items were of the familiar Cortina/Elan style engineering. But some of the parts are unique to a Europa. As the parts started to come off and pile up next to the parts cleaner, I had to decide how far I wanted to get this weekend. It's always good to have a milestone in a project to give yourself a sense of accomplishment. My wrench trick didn't work with some of the big bolts that hold the back of the trans and I didn't have anything big enough to try and unbolt the rear axles, so I decided to see if I could yank the engine before going home for the weekend. I pulled off the 33 year old hoses and oil pressure line and starter and alternator and muffler - actually, the muffler and exhaust pipe is a newer stainless steel item. The engine/trans bolts came off pretty easily but the motor mount bolts were stubborn, requiring liquid wrench and a lot of leverage.
It just so happened that my cherry picker (actually one that I have semi-permanently borrowed) was in the basement. Since no one else was home at the time, it took a bit of planning to push that thing up the stairs and into the garage all by myself without popping something important on my body, but I did it (get the cherry picker up the stairs that is, not pop anything important). After a little wiggle here and prying there and moving the radiator pipe out of the way, I soon had the engine out and hanging and spewing antifreeze all over the place. I plopped the engine onto the engine stand, wiped most of the muck off my hands and cracked open a cold one. Since it was still drizzling rain outside. I sat in the swing under the porch watching the clouds and rain and wind on the water for a bit - just relaxing. That's what this is all about. This restoration project stuff. It's just relaxing.
