Lotus Elite Barn find, SwissRacing's next LeMon Car (Page 2 of 3)

Bolt pattern - it's either Spitwad -er Spitfire or mini - which is to say 4on4 or 4on3-3/4. that said. um, good luck?

yeah let me know what you end up doing. We were thinking about doing a setup similar to this:

John,

Regarding the subframe or, bottom part of the cage shown in this picture do you want it to be made out of the same tubing as the cage, or can we use square stock like 2X2 steel with .12 wall thickness?

Agreed!!  Even though I don't know the team....
Fark!  I wanted to do one bad, too.  I guess I'll just buy one for myself.

Well heck.  I should have figured that we wouldn't be the only people to try to run one of these @ Lemons.  We've had one for over a year, but have put most of our effort into keeping the E30 running amidst our increasingly busy non-LeMons schedules, so the Elite has been somewhat neglected.

We have managed to get it stripped & start mocking up cage designs, but that's only happened in the last couple of months.  At the moment, the E30 needs some love, so the Lotus goes to the back burner again.

Ours is a little unique in that it was extensively modified back when bell bottoms were modern style and Corvette Summer was on the big screen.  We happened upon it through a refrigerator sale on craig's list (no joke) - it had been rotting in someone's garage, got some attention a few years ago, broke, and went back to rotting.  It may have been a show car at some point judging by the "Look, but don't touch" sign we found buried under some corduroy next to the mouse nest and molted lizard skins in the cabin.

Misery loves company, so here's hoping for some good shared info & luck on getting these horribly beautiful monsters [back] on a track.

Colin Chapman would be prou... err...  uhh..  think we are all idiots. 

JayDM? Does that mean they come at a cheap-ass price? As in "I found this in the junkyard and the car was so rare and unwanted the owner gave them to me."

Well we finally started tearing into the Lotus, the cage build won't be that bad after all.  The Lotus has steel side sills that we can bolt the front 4 point of the cage to. Then we are going to join the side sills to the back bone of the lotus via 4 more connecting points.  The only other trick things are going to be the seat mounting and our fuel cell setup  We have to build a frame to mount the seat to because the factory points are just thicker pieces of fiber glass.  We are also going to have to make some sort of cage for the fuel cell because aft of the rear wheels there is no metal protection, only fiberglass.

I believe you or someone else on the Lemons tech crew already helped another team with their lotus elite cage design.  We are basically going to copy their cage design.

Here are pictures of their cage design, please let me know asap if you have any issues with how they tied into the backbone.

http://churchofbk.com/bteam/chotus/cage/

Yes, do it like that.  I worked with the fabricator on that one. Spent a while on the phone.

We've been waiting a long time for a Lemons Elite.

Just a heads up, the cage shown in the link was not complete at that time. There's more reinforcement on the passenger side, and the lower min hoop brace that goes over the transmission tunnel was tied into that tunnel.