Beautiful day in NJ on Saturday. Clear skies, nice breeze and sunny. Low humidity. Took a couple of drives in my Elan S1 to get parts during the day, was hard to come back to the garage to work. But I have a project to complete so I stayed focused!
Riveted the support bar onto the backside of the front bonnet. That was easy. Hopefully the rest of the day goes like that.
Now that all the body to chassis bolts are all in place I am comfortable putting the Europa back on the lift to work underneath it.
Installed the custom exhaust system I bought from the UK last year (thanks Alex!). It's been in a box in the garage and I dug it out from my storage place and laid out the parts on the floor. As I was studying them closely (why I didn't do that when the package arrived a year ago I'll never know) I realized two things. The gasket they supplied for the flange was wrong and there was no mounting bracket on the silencer to the transaxle. Mmmmmm, the bracket missing was a big deal. Need to figure that out. I'm cursing myself for throwing away the old silencer as I could have made a pattern from the bracket on it and made a new one. Went to Pep Boys with the short end of the exhaust pipe and flange and convinced the nice young lady at the parts counter to hunt through all her exhaust gaskets in the back parts bins to find the right size. She came back to me 10 minutes later with an assortment and found exactly what I needed. The installation went well, just a small alignment issue with the collector pipe that was easily corrected. Everything got installed and all I need now is a bracket to hold the silencer in place.
As suggested by a couple of you, I made a small modification to the lower bell housing plate so it could be held in place with more than one bolt. Some cutting, grinding, painting and then final install. All good.
I'm installing a custom stainless steel braided fuel lines from the fuel tanks to the electric fuel pump and then to the Weber's. Measure everything and drilled two more larger holes for the larger than OEM fuel lines and then installed rubber grommets to prevent metal to metal contact. Installed all the AN-6 fittings, tighten everything up and added two additional support brackets to prevent unwanted movement in the fuel lines. You should be aware that the new aluminum fuel tanks come with AN-4 fittings so you will need adapters if you want to use larger fuel line for AN-6 fittings. I still haven't decided on the location for the fuel pump so I left lots of braided line to cut later. Need to put the rear luggage box in and see where I can install various pieces of equipment (Coil, Fuel pump, breather tube and oil collection tank) that don't interfere with the box.
While I was under the car checked all cables for possible interference and either zip tied them or used proper mounting brackets. The emergency brake cables have specific designed brackets that clamp to the chassis to keep them from hanging below the chassis. I have new ones from RD Enterprises and installed them.
