The Elan is back!
Click to enlarge
Our 1971 Lotus Elan +2 was up at our favorite shop, Proper Noise, in Pennsylvania getting some “fettling” as British people say.
I was driving it to its first big car show last October and all of a sudden white “smoke” (turned out it was actually steam) started coming out from under the hood, and the clutch stopped working properly. As Proper Noise were able to figure out, the rubber hose to the clutch slave cylinder was too close to the exhaust pipe and burned through, leaking its clutch fluid out. So they fixed that up and re-routed it to avoid the problem in the future.
Since it had been a little over a year and exactly a thousand miles since the engine was rebuilt, they gave it a once over, checked compression, torqued the head, etc. They also installed a new exhaust which looks and sounds much better than the rusty old one!
I hadn’t been able to drive it since October, so it was wonderful to take it out for a quick spin, and was blessed with a warm spell (50’s). Looking forward to getting some more drives in soon!
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