Roll up! roll up! Guess the weight of the Lotus Esprit body shell! Reply to this comment with your best guess. Competition closes after the video has been live for 24hrs. Winner(s) will get a ❤ and receive a pack of Soup stickers. ** Comp has closed - the correct weight was 145kg/319.6lbs. Winner's guessed within 5kg/11lbs either side. If you recieved a ❤and would like a sticker set, send a message via the About tab on the channel main page **
True ! I like the white too ! Also, because George doesn’t have an interior yet , choosing a color at this stage of the game ? Hmm , hopefully he lines something up during the time he preps the body…
Happy to see the body finally getting sanded! From one Lotus guy to another, beware of invisible fiberglass cracks... Whenever you think you've found all the cracks, wipe over the car with wax and grease remover and check for dark lines as it dries; you'll find all of the cracks that are normally indistinguishable from sanding scratches, and it will save you from a ruined paint job (primer doesn't fill them). This happened on my Elise project and it was miserable
And here you thought the body work would just fit into one video! Stop motion, your perfect narration, fantastic editing and all in a nice 14 minute video. Great start to the bodywork journey, George!
I'm enjoying you documenting of the restoration more than you can imagine. I'm in the process of doing a similar project on a Puma GTC. I can tell you that a rotisserie for the body work is priceless. Doesn't matter if you build it yourself or buy it you will not regret it.
The channel My Mechanics is restoring a Datsun 240Z, and the first thing he did was build a rotisserie... as the series progressed I understood why. Good luck with the Puma!
A lovely job in the making. I have to admit the animated scenes with the music for me is a delight. - Just special. looking forward to the next installment. Best of luck and regards, John
Please, please, please keep the black Lotus badges. They were in honour of Jim Clark after his tragic death and in my view every Lotus since 1968 should have had black badges. From a Jimmy fan since I was 8 in 1961.
Loving the build as someone who’s done a few cars and motorcycles restorations I can appreciate all the work. Good on you for seeing it though, most people stop halfway through the tear down
Heading home ‘on da’ bus’ so will have to forgo an immediate click and watch of this latest episode. This is an obviously deliberate act of timing by George, the tease!
Awesome video, as usual. Thank you for all the hard work. The early Esprit’s all crack around the headlights, you may want to (lightly) reinforce underneath…
This build is going to take forever and I'm not going to put much faith in getting to see it finished so good luck and I hope it turns out how you want it to
Great to see you progressing into the body shell. Having watched all the meticulous metalwork on the rolling chassis I hope the fibreglass gives you far fewer dramas. Suggest you wear gloves if you want to keep the skin in your hands too! 😃
I'm so friggin excited for you, George b'y. This car is going to be a new legend for the restoration lovers - but mainly, it's going to be *your* artful masterpiece. Now, I wonder if something like lightening holes in discrete places would benefit the weight saving goals. Perhaps there's a couple spots where 2 cm of fibreglass won't be missed!
Please don't Dremel out individual gel cracks and fill them, they'll only come back. Get a copy of "How to Restore Fibreglass Bodywork" by Miles Wilkins, it'll teach you all you need to know.
There is a product I've seen used on automotive fiberglass restoration. Its a epoxy based filler infused with carbon fibre. Helps prevents spider cracks after paint.
110 Kg! That is my unqualified shot in the twilight from watching your ability to almost carry it yourself but lifting it somewhat trouble free with a friend.
At least you don’t have to worry about the body panels rusting if you don’t primer. I also like the white color. But I know that race green from the past is preferred. Looking good so far.
Interesting that the "balance point" was about the mid point between the wheel arches, I would've guessed that the front half wthe the low bonnet would've weighed less.
Yo George ! Thank you for another video ! Right in line with all the others - top shelf buddy ! Is this your 15th video this year ? Think you can make us another 2 before years end ? Like maybe 1 for Christmas and 1 for New Years ? That would be crazy if u can deliver
At some point you should do a "montage" of making an episode, show up how the camera is set up ( and what camera exactly ), a before and after ( which of course we already see ) but narrate in the TIME it takes including the editing and how you figure your dialogue.
Well, I've paused the video at the intro to have a ponder about how much I think the shell weighs. I don't know if lotus used any metal reinforcements in the Esprit's body, or how much (And what kind of) sound deadening they saw fit to add, but I'm imagining I'm one of a pair of people picking it up to move it, and I'm feeling at the front I wouldn't be lifting much more than 60kg, but at the back I'd be struggling with a 70 or 80kg deadlift. So let's split the difference there and say I guess it will be around 135kg I'm really hoping you DO reveal the shells weight in this video, because I'm now curious how far off I am. 🙂 EDIT - Soooooo close........ But in my defence, I'd just like say that I didn't think about it still having all those brackets, headlining, etc in it. And when I said "metal reinforcements" I was thinking more about laminated in load spreading metal plates for areas like seatbelt anchor points, where door, bonnet, rear hatch hinges bolt to, and maybe roll over structure in the A and B posts. Not a myriad of bolt in braces. I'm really surprised (though thinking about it, I shouldn't have been) to see how the balancing point of the shell shows that it's pretty nose heavy. I really thought those rear arches and buttresses would have added to the weight out back, but now I think about it, the Esprit had close to a 50/50 weight distribution, so the shell would have to be designed as light as possible in the rear so the engine didn't drag the CoG too far back.
While I don't exactly know what you're missing in the interior, don't fret, if you can't get everything surely you can just build and 3D-print stuff that looks even better. Instead of the original gauges, use a screen for the gauges and all that. While a restoration is fine, it's ok to do custom stuff if you're replacing lost bits.
Just Imagine what Colin Chapman and his chaps could have done had they had exactly saturated, high-temp curing carbon-fiber prepregs and vacuum bagging in the 1 bar-region as their building method for road cars (instead of polyester-snot-with-shortstrand-cut-up-glass) after a rough finite elements construction to find the load-peaks in need of more than one layer per sandwich-side .... That Esprit was made pre-crazy-crash-requirements, so weight in the shell would have been concentrated only where needed for the sled to be stiff enough to not shrug off her doors when opened or not lose her frontlights in 220 kph nightdrives .... That is like thinking of Nathanael Herreshoff (Capt'n Nat, the yacht-builder from Rhode Island) and what _he_ would have done with epoxy and carbon. On the other hand: taking off considerable amounts of weight with 80grit will make it even lighter. White topcoat will need way less layers, weightwise, than the green one - just sayin' 😆; that "let's not have heavy color"-approach is what made the Mercedes silver-arrows back in the days: Aluminium, bared of any paint whatsoever. Thanks for sharing!
If you are still planning to race it, modern sticky tyres will place a lot more torsional load through the chassis and body than that which it was designed. My Alfa gtv developed lots of cracks through its 20 years of club racing. Think about how to strengthen while you have it apart. Easier now than later.
I'd wager that the measurement with the two scales is more accurate. Those cheap scales are likely non-linear in their accuracy. It's easy enough to measure that deficiency when they are designed and skew it so that it's most accurate around the median adult weight (even if they don't come out perfect like you saw with the one). If the car weighs close to two adults, then I'd say use the measurement with the two scales.
If it's twice your weight, it's 160kg (give or take). Which, given glass fibre and polyester resin, seems believable. But it also sounds as though you could cut the weight of the bodyshell by well more than half by going for a carbon/nomex layup with epoxy resin, particularly if you used either pre-preg or vacuum bagging to keep the epoxy content minimal.
lotus body shells are light unlike american once the corvettes would have been lighter probably if they made the body from steel when the body is half an inch thick
Sadly due to the BABVVO and TEBBVO laws, all petrol cars will unfortunately soon be banned from public streets in the EU, CH USA and Scandinavia :-( In Germany, the Green People's Party has given the order to shorten the fuel supply from 2025 by reducing all conventional gas stations to just one state-run central gas station per city or county Now they even want to slow down all gas pumps by 20 liters per minute to 2 liters per minute... From 2027, some car spare parts will also be banned in the EU... such as exhaust systems, turbochargers and even some engine and gearbox oils. .. California and New York will do the same from 2027... So no more investing in petrol cars... They even created a new type of crime here called emissions and smoke crime . "Bundesabgasbespaßungsverbotsverordnung" BABVVO in Germany and HESCHLAVVO in Switzerland and SMORVERBIDDEN in Sweden. Unfortunately, aditionaly the Green Jesus Federal Exhaust Gas Funneling Prohibition Ordinance (BABVVO) will soon ban the driving of combustion engines in public outside of verifiable commuter trips and transport trips, as exhaust gas fungus will then be a traffic offense! In addition, the green Jesus of Germany is probably planning to shut down all chimneys and have them filled with foam from June 2025.
If it's structural, I'm guessing 8-900 pounds. Reason is my experience with boat hulls. Fiberglass in that era was built with a heavy hand, too much chopped glass and too much resin. EDIT: OK, by <a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="68">1:08</a> I've seen I was wrong, but that also means it's not really structural at all.
296 lbs. Not sure what that is in kilograms and still kinda annoyed that the Brits dropped off the Imperial system here and switched to Metric themselves.
Brits have (officially) not one so, because official Brits are still stone-age idiots. Everyone with seven sixteenths of an ounce of common sense, of course, has left all that how-many-firkins-to-the-furlong nonsense in the dustbin of history where it belongs.
I legit didn't cheat I posted this about 3 min after it went live and well before I saw you weighing it. I'm sure someone got closer but I happy with my guess.
She will be beautiful when you arebfinisch with here. I always think on the James bond film with roger more and the lotus .I had a dinkytoy on when I was young long time ago, by the way
You never make life easy for yourself - there must be some mechanical method of removing the paint that doesn’t cause irreparable flat spots… surely? But if you did make it easy, perhaps the joy of the process would be lost too… regardless of that, thank you for sharing the joy.
Lotus could not afford the tooling and heavy machinery required to produce a body. Nor the duration of time that process takes. Fiberglass molding is far easier to achieve on their scale. Almost a garage industry. While weight was considered, they really did not have an affordable alternative. Take the Corvette, for example. Even GM, which could have afforded the tooling and stamping, chose to go with fiberglass. Mostly due to the limited production runs. It was not financially prudent to invest that much time and expense.
Hi! Why is your gear lever “bent backwards” (or was it an optical illusion on the video?) - every Esprit I’ve ever owned or seen has an upright gear lever!?
Indeed it is, by maybe 5-10 degrees…but I think I just realised why it looked odd at first glance in the video when you are replacing the blue centre console - it must be in gear? 2nd most likely or 4th?? As when in neutral it would stand up much straighter I’m sure…anyway another excellent episode, I can’t imagine how long the stop motion sanding down sections must have taken to produce, but the results from an entertainment perspective speak for themselves, bravo! Cheers and good luck with the interior search also!
Actually it's because the linkage isn't connected and the shifter naturally sits back a little. A week in those short stop motion sanding sections btw. Thanks a mill :)
@@soupclassicmotoringthat would definitely explain it! I should have thought of that myself! 😂 And yet again great work George - I look forward to the next instalment!
