There is some fanaticism required to restore and then love an early Lotus. I did a complete mechanical and cosmetic restoration of my Twin Cam and many of you have seen the results. She’s sweet! I had the body professionally painted. But, I just couldn’t turn over the car to be painted without fixing the body fit issues. I’m glad I did because I am in love with the results.
This article documents this part of the restoration. It is a 90 hour project I undertook to try to bring the doors, hood and deck lid body fit as close as I could to contemporary specifications. No small feat as the original condition of a 1970s era Lotus body fit is… well, just plain horrible. Again, this work was done just prior to turning the car over to be professionally painted. The good news is that after the car was painted, the panels reinstalled with the same fit this project created. Nothing moved! Even now two years later, nothing has moved!
Even if you don’t attempt such a project, hopefully you may find some nuggets in this article that are helpful. The article is in two parts. In this Part 1, I will describe my overall process and show specifically what was done on the deck lid and hood. Part 2 will appear in the next issue of Lotus Notes and cover the more complex door fit process. It will include some revelations about the actual mechanics of the door hinge which might surprise some Lotus owners.
So why did I feel confident enough to take on this project? I felt I had the expertise in both body fit and the expertise in working with fiberglass. In the early 1980s, I worked for General Mo-tors at the Technical Center in Warren Michigan. One of my first engineering assignments was to rectify body fit issues in several assembly plants on the X-cars. The X-cars included the Chevrolet Citation which seems to have mysteriously vanished from this planet. I never see one of these cars on the road any more. Never! Anyway, the body fits were horrible. I became an expert in understanding the geometry, mathematics, and the art of body fit. By art, I mean the assembly line workers using mallets and pry bars to artfully coerce the doors to fit. As far as fiberglass goes, I did plenty of repairs and fiberglass projects during the 31 years I owned boats. Before that, I was a model aviation buff and built numerous molds and fiberglass fuselages of my own design. Therefore, I was ready to enter this Lotus project quite fearlessly. So let’s get started.
Rules of Engagement: I wanted to keep this project as simple as possible so I set some engineering based rules of engagement. These set the sequence of activity for each panel, one at a time. Here they are:
- Put the panel in the opening in such a way that it maximize the quality of the fit. (In the case of the doors, you will lock down the hinge and striker position for the duration of the project).
- Document where you are starting from with a camera. You will also want to use a marker pen to document gap and flushness measurements right on the panels and openings so you know where you are going to make changes.
- Plan on working only one surface to fix the fit. By this I mean for any given location, plan on doing the fiberglass work on either the panel or the opening but not both if you can avoid it.
- When the fiberglass work begins, work on flushness first. Gap rectification will be second.
- Always use fiberglass cloth – never use Bondo as it may crack later on.
Right or wrong, these were the rules of engagement I used on this project and they worked very well. Now the fun part!
Deck Lid: I use the term deck lid for the aft panel that covers the engine compartment. The first rule; how well does the original panel fit in the opening? Not so good! There are minor flushness issues on top. Some of the side gaps are pretty off. But the major issue is the “duck tail”. No matter how you re position the deck lid, you can’t get a good fit. Figure 1 shows the original fit of the “duck tail”. It protrudes out at the bottom. It turns out this mismatch issue is common to all Europas I’ve seen and is probably caused by factory molds which were off. A measure of the problem shows me that the tail is off by 1.4 degrees. What to do? Take a deep breath here folks.
I decided to cut the duck tail at the apex and glass it in from the inside at the correct angle. The trick to making this effort work is to firmly set the two halves of the deck lid properly so they can be precisely glassed in together.
Figure 2 shows the trick I used to keep the two halves in proper orientation. You can see that I formed two straps out of fiberglass on the two corners to hold the pieces in proper orientation. I put masking tape on the painted surface so the strap wouldn’t bond to the deck lid. The straps were made with fiberglass mat and were about 3/16 thick. After they were cured, I drilled through holes and secured them with ¼” bolts just in case. The resulting holes in the deck lid were easily patched later.
Figure 3 shows the deck lid after the apex was cured and the side flanges were joined together to complete the structure of the repair. By this time, I had already started to build up the deck lid side flanges to reduce the gaps on each side. You can see that the exterior surface of the apex was also covered in several layers of fine fiberglass cloth (4 oz at 0.005” per layer) to reinforce the exterior surface against cracking.
All finish sanding was done with a long wood block using 220 sandpaper. Use of the wood block was critical for getting a smoothly contoured surface. You can never sand freehand!
Hood: I lucked out here. The fit of the hood in the opening was fairly good. I did have to sand down maybe 0.120” on the body at the wheel well in order to get a good flushness. Luckily, there was plenty of fiberglass thickness to work with. There were also some places where the gaps were tight but these were rectified by sanding back the flange on the hood, or the opening. Figure 4 shows one area of the body that received considerable attention. A radio antenna hole was patched and the surface over the patch was reinforced with 4 oz fiberglass cloth. Again, the use of a sanding block was critical for getting a smooth contoured surface.
Next Month: Next month I’ll cover the doors complete. I’ll make some revelations about the mechanics of the door hinges which might surprise you.
