Steven162

Where's the Pistonheads parrot when you need it?

I have been around Lotus for most of my life. My parents took over a pub in Wymondham in 1974 when I was 7. Lots of the customers worked at Lotus and some of them would take me to the open days. I remember Donny McLocklen (not sure of spelling) coming to our junior school and giving a talk about Lotus, the next Friday night he came into the pub and became a regular and a good friend of my parents. He was the coolest bloke on earth, driving through the town centre in the dark in his brand new company Esprit with just the side lights on, and parking it outside the pub, I think he also used to drive one the white James Bond cars. At 21 I started work at Lotus, a lot of the customers were still there, which was strange, they remembered be a little boy. Lotus owned my Esprit for 10 years before I bought it from them, it was always around somewhere, I never expected to own it. My colleague Peter was telling me I should offer to buy it for about 4 years before it came up for sale in a blind auction along with a few more cars. I put in my bid then went on a long working trip to China, I hadn't heard anything for a few weeks so emailed Scott Walker who was running the auction saying that as I had heard nothing I assume I have not won the car, he said on the contrary, its yours. I collected the car August 2014 and took voluntary redundancy from Lotus after 26 years in the November and have worked for JLR ever since. I returned for the 70th party last year.

Reference valve clearance, I am a automotive manufacturing engineer and have specified, signed off the design, and carried out final acceptance and handover to production of 2 tappet selection machines, both cost over £1m and are still in production today. The machines measure the cams before they are assembled into the head ( base circle diameter, cam journal diameter and centre to centre distance) and the head ( cam journal diameter and distance from valve tip to cam journal centre) and probably some stuff I have forgotten. The machine then calculates the correct size bucket tappet for each position and walks the operator through a process of filling a mask with the correct tappets, these are then all measured to ensure they are correct before the operator puts the mask on the head and presses the tappets into the head. After all this measuring the machine still has a 'fudge factor" built in so each tappet position can be tweaked up or down until the selected tappet gives the correct clearance, although once set over a number of heads the fudge factor remains stable.

Hi all, I passed the test on Saturday, I can thoroughly recommend this, I enjoyed every minute, learnt a lot and now enjoy driving more. Thanks to Clive from the Norfolk and Norwich group.

Colourcote in Hethel, they did them first time round after all!

Sorry.........

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Lotus-Esprit-The-Official-Story-The-Inside-Story-of-Britains-Best-Loved/113579944533?epid=90106239&hash=item1a71e46a55:g:HZ8AAOSwI01cRKhn:rk:11:pf:0 Cheap at the moment

Good question, I don't know! Maybe cams with oversize journals, although my parts list only lists one cam type. I remember them being stamped by Dave Simmonds who only did the line boring and the diagonal oil drilling in the cam seal bore. Its definitely not oversize tappets though!

I used to machine these, albeit the later flat cam cover ones. I am pretty sure it's oversized cam bores. Cam bores were line bored using adjustable inserts, tappet bores were machined using fixed blade Mapal guided reamers, any over size tappet bores meant the casting was scrapped. The letters are probably the initials of the person who did the machining then the line boring, doing this was a requirement after every big fuck up but would only last a few months. Out of interest, up until about 1990 the machining was done on Moog tape controlled vertical milling machines, after that on Mazak 3 axis vertical machines. If you have flat cam cover carriers with the I and E letters stamped on they were done on the Moog, if it is machined on it was done in the Mazak. I wrote the CNC code for the Mazak machine to machine these. Steve

I use my deflector every time I drive the car with the roof out, it makes loads of difference. I think it comes as standard with the glass roof cars

My daily driver could drive around the world (~25,000 miles) using less fuel than it would take to fill my central heating oil tank

Agree about clips, on my g turbo the clips will only go back if I loosen and turn the distributor, then I have to set the timing again

We switched to Bulb for electricity only, about month ago, yearly cost should be £600 against British Gas cost of £800. British Gas smart meter has gone dumb but its easy to give a meter reading on the App.

I couldn't be bothered to read all that