paulbrown22

Sorry to hear this Stanley - the curse of having too many cars and not being able to drive them all?! The wrong side of London for you, but if Sparky can't fit you in I'm very happy with the service from Rapid Mechanical Services in Romford, who do the yearly service/MOT on my Esprit and are a Lotus specialist. Or if the car's in Teddington, the likes of Max500 and others in the Guildford/Woking area who have a very good reputation? Hopefully an easy/quick fix and you're back on the road soon.

A friend has sent me pics of that one before under it's cover - a dark green S3 NA with gold pin stripes.

Would love to and had just secured permission from my wife, but then realised that sadly the London Marathon means I can't actually get my cars out of our road on Sunday due to all the closures around Blackheath/Greenwich. Will hopefully be able to make the next one!

Great work on the veneer, but I was admiring the vintage Clifford AutoImmobiliser - I have the same in my Esprit, and wish people still sold some extra keys for it!

Lovely car, looking forward to seeing some progress updates!

Having sat in the car for 5 mins with the dash lit up and covering them one by one to try and block out any light from the surrounding gauges, I think all of my instruments have greenish tints to them as per TAR above... However they are so dim the dreadful camera on my phone stands no chance of taking a photo sadly unless I switch on the main garage lights, which then negates the point of the photo!

Those auxiliary instruments on my 1987 HC NA are so dim I'm not entirely sure what colour they are, I think white-ish... Will pop out and have a look and try to take a photo!

Thankfully I haven't yet had to take my Esprit alternator apart, but I don't believe the factory OEM alternator has an external regulator - think it's all within the housing. If you do end up removing it, potentially worth taking to a trusted local alternator specialist for refurb/testing rather than buying a new probably far-eastern copy, as you hear lots of dubious stories about them!

Happy New Year to all, hope to meet some more TLF folk at events in 2023!

Supposedly yes! Some of the Ctek chargers have a mode to recondition and desulphate the plates in a standard lead acid battery. I've found it pretty good in the past with batteries that are losing capacity, but probably not if they've been pushed completely over voltage for an extended period.

That battery sounds like it's completely fried, so I'd swap it out anyway. And then once the new one is fitted, have your volt meter on it when you first start the car and monitor closely, and/or get someone else to start the car for you so you can stay at the engine bay. If it does instantly start to go above 14.5V then just switch off the engine and get the alternator fixed/replaced, but I don't think a few seconds over voltage is going to trouble a new battery too much - your Ctek on recondition pushes it up to 14.8 I think anyway to desulphate the plates.

It's worth doing some basic load testing of the battery too after charging, i.e. turn on your headlights for a few minutes and see whether the voltage holds. It might hold steady after a charge with no load, but as soon as any load is applied, it plummets.

To be fair, I only have one Lotus, unlike most!

If the battery is really at 16V after being on a CTEK it's presumably fairly knackered then. Unless you accidentally have your CTEK on it's recondition mode which from memory puts out about 15.8V, and you tested as that part of the charge programme finished? If you have a volt meter and/or clamp meter you can do some load testing of the battery and check the alternator output when running. It's quite possible the alternator is also screwed - the alternator rectifier on one of my boats went wrong a few years back such that the alternator was putting out close to 18V and frying the battery...

Yes, I think the guy on the gate was slightly surprised given the conditions! I must have already been driving by the time McDonalds was suggested, sorry to miss people there. Very best Christmas wishes to all, hopefully see everyone next year.