Lotus Elan Chassis

Hello, my name is Paul Egg. I am restoring a 1966 LED from the alarm series. In this video we will see the

chassis

. The

chassis

is made of mild steel, largely eighteen gauge, which is one point two millimeters thick and some areas are thick. at one point six millimeters thick, if you can call it thick, it is mild steel and in total it wastes the sheet metal well, so not all of this, you can see that the sheet metal chassis weighs 40 kilograms, which is 88 pounds, it is fixed to the body at 16 points, we look at those points through the body.

I'll point them out on the chassis as we go and as you can see it's a box section in the center that splits into two sections running either side of the engine and gearbox. running up to where the front suspension is mounted, so these front towers are fixed to the front of the chassis and between the front towers there is a box section that runs through. You can see down here the front torus called the fulcrum pin that is located on the inside of the fork. It is fundamental and between the turrets there is a box section.

You want to break the cable completely so that there is a box section between these turrets and outside the front edge of the box section of these stabilizers that hold the steering rack if we move rearward. You can see the again bisected box section going back to these rear uprights that hold the top of the suspension struts. These are known as Chapman struts and these two rear uprights are joined together by this beam section that has two mounting points that you can see there. or the final drive differential and you'll see them down here varies, the bottom of the chassis extends back from that center case section and is joined together so that at the top are these two tubular sections that are bent to prevent where is the back.

The driveshafts will be and the bottom of the Chapman strut attaches to this very wide frame so a friend will remove the bottom of the chassis and make it as long as possible so the suspension geometries are as good as possible. where they made the chassis, I in the rear and we have the front or the differential. Marty Mouse, you can see their universal joints on the propeller shaft that runs down the center of the case section, most of the way down the center of the chassis. and you can see I obviously need to get in there and polish a little bit today.

Karai, look around and you'll see there's an access hole on the side of the chassis where the universal joint on the other end of the driveshaft is and where it goes to the back of the gearbox, we also have a cable running up the inside the box section and comes out, yes, that is the cable hanging on the back. You can see this arrangement here, you can rip Ameena's light flight so that hand The brake cable pulls this tree arrangement as it is known, I think, and for this and out of these two friction points, Rob just runs in any direction, so this one that goes to this side will go to the other side and operates the handbrake pads which on the The discs are fine, also in the box section there is this insulating material that is glued on and is quite fibrous.

Someone suggested that it would absorb a lot of water and cause corrosion, and it may have done so in the past. Anyway, that wasn't the reason this chassis had failed on this particular car. I've gone with the same arrangement and it provides soundproofing between the chassis and body, and the body sits on top of this. There is a large tunnel between the body seats that straddles the chassis, quickly looking at the 16 attachment points, these holes. they were just being pilot drills, I'm going to drill them out so two setscrews go through to the threaded coils, we're back at the top of these backs or prize, this is quite a thick material here, so they get tapped so that the screws go into them and There is also the rear hole when the upper part of the seat belts is mounted and up to here, here, here, this is the front part of the footwell, which is two at the top of the chassis.

Here you can see where the plates are welded, the thick plates weld it. on the bottom so they are drilled and tapped and then with turrets and again there is a welded plate here so they are drilled and tapped and then right on the front these two on the stabilizers on the front and they bolt on threaded bombs to let it be one two three four five six so hello 10 12 13 14 15 16 this is a replacement chassis made when the last ones were still making them, although I think they were always outsourced, so it has a galvanized finish to which I then applied the correct primer.

It didn't fall and then everything was painted black. I think I later found out that for a series 2 it will probably be painted red anyway, it will stay black, I painted it black, the chassis member, the replacement numbers here, you may be able to see Burton bulb starts what the last one is replacement 26 on the top of the car so that's where the number is and when the cars were assembled you could still see that number looking towards the engine bay and as we said it's largely made of a point two. millimeter thick material so it looks quite flimsy, perhaps the box sections as you can imagine are very torsionally rigid and when bolted to the body the two assembled are extremely torsionally rigid , so for an open-top sports car, it's extremely impressive in that regard.

Just looking at some of the failure points, it's a very lightweight design as we've said and it suffered some failures, so these are the engine mounts, the engine mounts crack here over time, whether it's because the rubber part of this engine. fails and starts to build up more stress, but you can imagine with the movement of the engine it's probably just a fatigue crack, so on both sides you get a crack that spreads and then possibly worse than that on the back of tourists where the shock goes into the chassis here and there there's a section inside so it's like a box section and it's open here so the water and water that's thrown up by the road wheels can get in here and drop to the bottom of this box section and it just fills up, there are some drain holes here, you might see them, and they might get blocked because if you don't know how to clean them, they would and then it sits with moisture in the interior, so it rots from the inside. galvanized ones, so they shouldn't have that problem, but before they can be used on top again, they will probably be well maintained.

Charlie's drain holes at the bottom stay clean. Another interesting aspect of the chassis, this box section has to fight another front, so this box section is used as a container to maintain vacuum pressure, so there is a tube that goes to a board where there is a switch and it also runs to the front manifold and connects to this fitting so that air quickly enters the cylinders. The movement across the end of this causes a venturi effect, so the pressure drops and it will suck through the pipe. There is a check valve so it reduces the pressure in this section of the housing so it is somewhat under vacuum and that vacuum pressure is used to lift the headlight holder Oh with a rubber diaphragm capsule arrangement that I'll show in the later video, so it's a quick walk through the Lotus Elan chassis and it stayed the same throughout the production of its lungs from series one to series four in The sprint and the Lotus Elan plus two has a very similar, so if you buy a Lotus replacement chassis for the Lotus Elan it will have the same power throughout production, so I hope you found it interesting and I'm sure I will.

Posting more videos so stay tuned for those too and thanks for watching.