My hobby is restoring old Lotus Elans. I buy them all beat up or worn out or neglected for decades or just in boxes. I tear them all the way down - every last nut and bolt comes off. Then I sand-blast, sand, de-grease, grind, weld, re-build, powder coat, fiber-glass, Bondo and paint them back into some pretty nice cars. My latest project was a 1966 Lotus Elan S2 Drop Head Coupe that I bought off club member Larry Drummond. Larry had owned the Elan for many years but not long after he brought the car to LOG 22 back in 2002, the car developed some issues and Larry just parked it.
I bought the car from Larry, took it all apart and in about 18 months it was real close to being ready to sell. The whole time Larry had the car it was white and I thought that was the original color. But after sanding off a layer of white and a layer of primer and another layer of white and another layer of primer, I found that the original color was Blue. So I sanded off the blue and the primer under the blue too. I did all the body work and had the car painted in a bright blue that was close to the original Medici blue. The car looked great! The blue color fit the small car so well we named the car “Smurf”.
The car was running pretty good but still had some bugs when I brought it to the 2014 British Car Festival in September. Larry came out and he was able to drive the car around the parking lot a bit. He was very pleased and I got some good photos of him in the car with the sun reflecting off his big grin! After some Chicago styled voting, Smurf won “Best of Show”.
So I took the car home after the fest and started working on the bugs. I made a check list of things that were not perfect and worked away at setting things right. I had to play around a lot with the Weber carb settings – changing the jets until the engine was just right. The horn sounded like it had a cold so I figured out where the weak ground was at and grounded it. The car rode a little low so I cranked up the adjustable suspension and she looked right. The engine leaked too much oil so I found the leak and plugged it. Little things that just take a bit of fiddling and driving and fiddling until it starts to become a solid performer.
I was done with swatting all the bugs on a Friday when I took the car out for one final run. I was driving down the alley when I heard a low thhhh, thhhh thhhh noise that would speed up as I sped up and slow down as I slowed down. At first I thought it was a front brake caliper hanging up. Even though I had sand-blasted and rebuilt the calipers with new stainless steel pistons – you never know. But as my diagnosis progressed I determined it was… the speedometer! Now the speedometer and odometer and tripometer were functioning well and I had already installed a new speedo cable. But when I unscrewed the speedo cable and drive the car, the noise would disappear. I got on my knees and hooked up a different speedo cable to the back of the speedometer and hooked up my power drill to the other end of it. Sure enough, the speedometer was making a fairly loud noise that just resonated through the wood dash. So I pulled the speedometer out and set about to dissecting it on the work bench.
Speedometers can be tricky but if you have a real gentle touch, you can take the guts out of the body and do SOME work on them without destroying them. So I took the guts out. And I started to play around with the guts. I even got my 3X power dollar store glasses out with my magnifying glass and determined that it was just plain broke. The noise was coming from a part that only a specialist would be able to fix. I really did not have the patience to send the speedo off to be repaired. Fall was upon us and I wanted to sell Smurf before the snow started to fall. Both shops that I know of usually have about a month turn around time. So I went up in the garage attic and found a spare speedo. What I wanted to do now was reset the spare speedo to the same mileage of Larry’s car – about 20,600 miles. I played with the guts of the spare speedo and was able to reset it back to zero, but it would have taken major surgery to change the mileage to anything other than zero. So I started to take Larry’s speedo further apart thinking I could take the odometer part out of Larry’s speedo and put it in the spare speedo. With my 3X glasses on and a bright light I was able to disconnect a couple TINY little springs and unscrew a couple TINY little screws. But when I went to pull the main gyro type piece off (that’s JYROW not YEEROW), a brass coil spring got stuck and started stretching and I just stopped and put things back together.
Frustrated, I went in the house and started writing up my ad to sell Smurf. I knew, or at least I thought I knew that selling Smurf would take several weeks. Especially because this time, several Lotus friends had convinced me to ask a lot more money for this car than what I had been asking for other restorations in the past. So I took the ad for my last restoration – the Bernie Gaynor coupe and modified it to fit the attributes of Smurf. It didn’t take long, maybe an hour. Change Coupe to FHC. Change the color from Ardent Red to Medici blue - that kind of stuff. I put in an asking price of $48,500 – a pretty high number I thought. Then I posted the ad on Lotus Elan Dot Net. So even thought the car had a hole in the dash where the speedometer went, I was confident that I would get a working speedometer back in that hole by the time someone got serious about paying me some serious coinage.
Next morning, I went off to enjoy the opening leg of the Lotus Corps Fall Tour. Ken and Barb do a great job of stringing squiggly roads together and I was determined to enjoy some squiggles. At the first potty break stop my cell phone rang and it was a guy named Dave from New York inquiring about Smurf. Wow, that was fast! So I talked to Dave a bit and told him about the car and he said he was very interested. Everyone was done with the bath-room so the tour was starting back up. I told Dave that I would talk to him later and off I went.
That was Saturday. Throughout Saturday and Sunday we played telephone tag, even exchanging texts here and there but we never got a chance to seriously talk.
Monday morning I awoke early at the beautiful Blue Harbor resort in Sheboygan, Wisconsin and did a bit of email/web surfing before heading to an early breakfast at 7 because we had scheduled an early tour of the Kohler plant at 8:45. The tour is a very comprehensive 2 and a half hour tour and the tour guide requested that we shut off our cell phones - so I did. It was a GREAT tour and I would highly recommend it to anyone who has a spare half day in Kohler, Wisconsin.
Next up was lunch so I ordered my meal and decided to try calling Dave again. I turned the cell phone back on and it immediately starts beeping and burping to tell me I had text messages and voicemails galore. So I call Dave up and we finally connect and almost the first words out of his mouth are “I’d like to offer you $45,000”. Wow. That’s nice money. Considering I sold my last restoration for $34,000 it was a challenge for me to hold back from saying YES. So we talked a bit more and I said I would take $47,000 and he said – SOLD!
I was very pleased and very excited when I entered the area in the restaurant where our Lotus bunch was lunching and yelled out “It’s Sold!” Everyone was happy but then they expected me to buy them all lunch. It’s nice Lotus money but not nice Ferrari money so – no!
Later on after lunch, I had not checked my voicemails yet but I started getting calls. We were driving to a Walmart to get some stuff and the phone rang and someone wanted to buy Smurf. I politely told them it was already sold. We got into the Walmart and someone else called wanting to buy Smurf. Again I had to tell them I had just sold it. Then I started getting texts from an-other guy and when I checked my voicemail, I heard from several other people wanting to buy Smurf. What the heck is going on here? Why is this car so popular? Then I thought about it for a bit and wondered… I wonder if it’s posted on Bring A Trailer? BAT is a website that looks for and posts ads of interesting cars that are for sale on other websites. They scan ebay, Hemmings, Craigslist, Kijiji and many, many other obscure sites for interesting, unique or rare cars for sale. They prefer project cars but post ads for all sorts of sweet autos. You can also request them to automatically send you a daily email with all the goodies they have found and have posted for the day. The email comes out at 7 AM every day, 7 days a week and I get it and check it out every day. But this morning, I had closed my lap top at 6:55 to get ready for our early breakfast. Had I stayed on line for a few minutes more I would have seen Smurf being boldly featured on BAT. Lotus Corps member Jeff Cohen had submitted my ad to BAT and I guess they liked it. As did many other people as I’m still getting calls (all right, just one) a month later.
It was very satisfying to read the positive comments I received about the car on Lotus Elan Dot Net as well as BAT. It feels real good to put a lot of time and effort into something and then have many people voice their approval.
Later on in the evening when we returned to our 4 bedroom condo at the Blue Harbor resort where a bunch of us were staying, the kidding and ribbing began in earnest. Some of the feedback and emails I had gotten were a bit over the top with praise for my restoration skills. Ken Olendzki started the ribbing out by saying I needed to get a much bigger hat to fit my now swollen head. I countered by offering to sign Jeff Nack’s glove box door a’la Caroll Shelby style. We started calculating what kind of money I could make if I restored one Elan a month… It was all good fun.
So I returned to the garage on Wednesday and installed the spare speedometer. The final test drive produced no more bugs to fix. The money was wired into my account by Wednesday and on Thursday of the following week she was gone.
So now I have a spare parking spot in the garage. But don’t worry; I have two more Elan projects in line. But that’s another story….. or two.
