You know the game called “Musical Chairs” that you played when you were a kid? Some adults would set up a bunch of chairs in a circle facing outwards, one less chair then there were kids. The music would start and you would walk around the chairs until the music stopped and you had to quickly find a chair and sit down. The one kid who did not have a chair to sit on was out. They would take away one chair and start the music back up and repeat the process until there was only one kid left sitting on one chair who was then declared the winner. I just went through some gyrations that kind of reminded me of that fun game.
I’m currently working on another Elan restoration. I call this car the Greenville car because it came from Greenville, North Carolina. Things were progressing well. I had stripped the car down and the body work was nearly completed so it was time to see what the chassis looked like under the original red oxide paint and some surface rust. I knew that the left front tower was bad. I could wiggle it by hand because the towers had filled up with muck and debris and water over the years and it had rusted out.
Dennis Stahl and I tossed the chassis into the back of Dennis’s truck and we took it to my sand blaster guy. When we got it back sandblasted, it looked good everywhere except for the front towers which were mostly gone now. Paul Quiniff spent several hours trying to weld in patch pieces but most of the remaining metal was so thin that he would constantly blow holes in the old metal trying to weld on new metal. After a very valiant effort I just said stop and started to explore alternatives.
My first thought was to just find a used chassis where maybe the back end was crunched but the front end was ok. I checked for one in the usual spots, ebay, Lotuselan.net, Lotus Talk and so on but to no avail. I then recalled that about a year ago Ken Olendzki sent me a picture of a Spyder chassis sitting at his powder coater friend’s shop. A Spyder chassis is an aftermarket chassis made in England that is made of square steel tubes instead of sheet steel like the original. It’s a bit lighter and a lot stiffer than stock. A few emails and phone calls later and I was on my way to Jim Fletcher’s shop. Jim did not want to sell me his Spyder chassis but he had the front end off a stock chassis that he was willing to give me – the right price!
I was very surprised by Jim’s shop as he had at least 6 Elans in various stages of construction plus a bunch of race cars including a Mallard. No, it did not go Quack, Quack when you tried to start it. After a tour of his shop and his airport hanger that he used for storage, I picked up my free front end and headed back to Paul’s shop.
I sand blasted the spare front end which had been cut off right behind the motor mounts and got a couple of big hammers out to try and straighten things out. Although there was no rust on this front end, it was fairly bent in many different spots and so after an hour or so of banging away I decided that welding junk onto my chassis was not something I wanted to do. I do try to keep a reputation of building solid cars.
Another of the chassis choices was to use the chassis that came with my NEXT project which we will call the Columbus car because I picked it up in Columbus, Ohio. OR another chassis choice was to use the spare Spyder chassis I had stored up at the lakehouse. But I have intentions to install my spare Spyder chassis on MY S1 Elan some day. But maybe I could take the chassis out of my own Elan and use that on the Greenville or Columbus car. But that would mean I would have to take my Elan apart and leave it apart or the Greenville car apart or both apart plus the Columbus car which is already apart. Kind of hard to keep track of all the Elan parts that are apart.
Here’s a little side story about the chassis on my Elan. I bought my Elan in 1988 with a Lotus replacement chassis. It’s a stock galvanized chassis that the previous owner in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma had installed when the original chassis had rotted away in a similar manner to what had just happened to the Greenville project. What makes this story interesting is that when he had the chassis replaced, the shop in Oklahoma had to have the car re-registered with the Lotus Replacement chassis number as the VIN. So the original VIN on my Elan was something like 26/0384. After they replaced the chassis, the VIN was changed to LR1519 which stands for Lotus Replacement number 1519. So… if I replace my Lotus Replacement chassis # 1519 with my spare Spyder chassis will I or should I change the VIN to SPY3472? Hmmmm. Not going to worry about that right now.
I was still in quite a quandary trying to figure out what chassis should go where when early one morning I awoke with a flash of brilliant selective memory! Well, maybe not brilliant, maybe 25 watts or so. Seems that’s all I got these days. I can name that song in a half a note but I can’t remember what the heck I went up into the garage attic for. So anyway, I remembered that when I had bought an Elan Coupe project from long time Lotus Corps member Bernie Gaynor a couple years back; he had a spare chassis hanging from his garage ceiling. I didn’t buy it at the time because I didn’t think I would ever need it. But I needed it now so I waited until normal courteous calling hours and gave Bernie a call. Yes, he still had the spare chassis, and yes I could buy it but he had not been in the garage in months and there was still quite a snow mound blocking the door. But this call gave him an excuse to get the shovel out and get out to the garage.
Three days later, Dennis was backing his pickup truck up Bernie’s drive and we were undoing the straps that held the chassis from Bernie’s garage ceiling. Bernie and the late Carl Grabowski (may he rest in peace) had hung the chassis up some 25 years ago or so.
Just another side note, this one about Bernie’s Cortina station wagon. He still has it and he found a local gas station/repair shop that got it running again after sitting on jack stands for 25 years or so. So now there are two Mk1 Cortina station wagons running around the NW suburbs of Chicago; Bernie’s and mine. What are the odds of that!
So I paid Bernie what he wanted for the chassis and took it back to Paul’s shop to check it for straightness on Paul’s big steel table. Everything lined up good, we unscrewed a couple bolts, drilled out a couple bolts and cut off a couple of rusted on bushings. Not too bad at all. My powder coater guy welded on a rein-forcing plate on the underside of the front end so that in the future when someone goes to jack up the car in the front where they shouldn’t be jacking up the car, the chassis will not bend under pressure. After sandblasting and welding and a nice thick powder coating in satin black, I now have a very sound and pretty chassis for my Greenville Elan restoration project.
So now the music has stopped and I’m a winner because my Columbus car chassis can be used on the Columbus car, my Elan with it’s LR chassis can stay together for the time being and I still have my spare Spyder chassis to swap out the LR chassis when I get around to that project. Plus I have a spare, spare chassis that is rust free and solid all the way up to the motor mounts where things get kind of Swiss cheesy.
