First Drive in the Lotus Elan +2 Is… Eventful.

Last week I wrote about how the beautiful red 1969 Lotus Elan +2 I’d just bought became an enormous source of stress when I tried to register it, and the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles denied me because the vehicle was “marked as stolen” in its database. During the week it took for it to get straightened out, I didn’t want to go all-in on sorting out the car, as there was the specter that I might have to return it. However, I couldn’t quite resist poking and prodding it in the garage. I was the new-purchase equivalent of just the tip.

Before I continue, I need to tell you that I asked the wife of the deceased previous owner if she and her husband had a name for the car. I take the continuation of such thing seriously. Of course, the problem is that if they tell you a name and you think it’s stupid, you’ve got a problem. About five years back I bought a BMW 2002 from its original owner. I asked her this question, and she said she called it “Baby.” I looked at her for a few seconds, then said “Yeah, I’m not calling it Baby.” This is the car that’s now named “Hampton,” after The Hamptons where it was purchased. The Elan owner’s wife said they called it “Prince Harry.” British royalty, redhead, smoking hot wife… I liked it. Prince Harry it is.

Harry had three acute needs that needed to be addressed before driving it further than the inspection station—the rodent smell, a grinding noise from the right front wheel, and a clanging universal joint. Let’s start with the mice, as the overpowering ammonia stench that materialized during my test drive was the thing that gave me license to calibrate an offer that got me the car.

As soon as I got the Elan into the garage, I began sussing out the mouse situation. In addition to the wailingly-strong smell, the seller and I saw a live mouse scurry down the vent hose and into the heater box, so I had zero question the box needed to be removed and cleaned. The only question was whether this needed to be done immediately. My very first step was to set some traps. My second was to yank out the two corrugated vent hoses and examine them for contamination. I found that they absolutely stank of mouse urine and had a chocolate sprinkles-like coating of mouse droppings in them. I planned to replace them, but found that the original correct hose was surprisingly pricey, so instead I rinsed them, sprayed them with enzyme-based cleaner, scrubbed the insides with a toilet brush I have in the garage for such things, and rinsed them again. They came up smelling fine.

With the hoses disconnected from the sides of the heater box, I could stick my head under the dash and directly peer into the vent ports, and immediately saw the top of a mouse nest.

Through a combination of reaching in with a gloved hand and using a length of flexible ¾-inch rubber hose adapted to my shop vac, I was able to pull out about half a Kleenex box full of nesting material.

I then snaked my iPhone-connected inspection camera into the heater box. I saw a few odds and ends, but no other motherlode. It appeared that the flexible suction hose was remarkably effective in pulling the bulk of the mouse nest out. Since, at this point, the car’s ability to be registered was still in limbo, I stopped, but I was gladdened by the fact that, while poking around under the dash, I didn’t see other mouse damage such as chewed wires or contamination on the rug. I reattached the vent hoses, turned on the blower fan, put all the flaps through their paces, and didn’t smell anything remotely approaching the poison gas attack I experienced during the test drive. I began to think that maybe this was all I needed to do.

Next I looked at the issue of the right front wheel grinding. The car did not do this during its short test drive; the problem materialized at the end of a victory lap I took around the neighborhood after I unloaded the car from the trailer. The fact that I might have broken something on a car I might need to return was uncharted territory for me. I put the car up on the lift and found that the grinding was coming from the caliper hitting the rotor because one of the two bolts holding the caliper to the retaining plate was completely missing, allowing the caliper to rotate about the remaining bolt. I pulled the other bolt out, took it down to the local hardware store, matched up a replacement, and tried to thread it in, but it wouldn’t go. It was bizarre. What, I thought—does it take two differently threaded bolts?

When I removed the caliper, I saw the problem: The missing bolt had snapped off in its threaded hole. I had no way to know if it broke and fell out during my victory lap, or it had happened long ago.

Dealing with a snapped-off bolt is never easy. The three main methods are to drill it out with larger and larger bits and then re-tap the hole, or drill it out, heat it with a torch, then carefully try using an EZ-Out (never just crank down on an EZ-Out on a cold bolt; it’ll snap off in the hole, and then you’re even more boned than you were before), or weld another bolt to it. I do have a both a torch and a MIG welder in the garage, but the idea of using either of them on a car I might still have to return didn’t sit well with me, so I thought I’d try the most minimally-invasive method first and get a drill hole through the bolt and see where that took me.

One of the techniques for drilling out a bolt involves using left-handed (“reverse”) drill bits. The idea is that while the bit is drilling through the bolt, it’s also spinning in the direction that loosens the bolt (and also vibrating and generating heat), and this may have the happy side-effect of actually removing it. I’ve never had it happen, but hey, it can’t hurt. I took out my left-handed bits, but realized that to use them, I needed to drill from the side the bolt had broken off from, which was less than optimal access under the nose of the car. I center-punched the snapped-off bolt so the bit wouldn’t wander, but found that all my left-hand bits were too dull to make any headway.

Okay, I thought, if I’m going to do this, I might as well do it from the other side where, once I removed the hub and rotor, the access was much better. Off came the components. I center-punched the tip of the broken bolt, found a good sharp titanium bit, began drilling, and partway through, to my stunned surprise, the snapped-off bolt simply unscrewed itself out of the hole. First time for everything, right? I’d like to tell you that I was so smart that I realized that if I drilled out the tip of the bolt rather than the snapped-off end, a standard right-hand bit would turn the bolt in the loosening direction, but it was entirely luck. I attached the caliper using one original and one hardware-store bolt and called it done.

I waited until the car was registered to address the third issue—the banging U-joint. This raised memories of my 46-year-gone 1970 Triumph GT6+ whose clanging rear axle I ignored, causing it to eventually fail completely with that sickening clang-Clang-CLANG-BANG!-whubba-whubba-whubba sound, ripping out the yoke and thus becoming a much more expensive repair.

While I had the Lotus on the lift, I rotated the drivetrain components and found that the source was the left half-axle inner universal joint. However, Lotus Elans and +2s came from the factory not with U-joints but with a pair of Rotoflex couplings, two on each half-axle. I’m quite familiar with these rubber flex-discs—on BMWs, they’re called “giubos” and mate the back of the transmission with the front of the driveshaft. Even back in the day, these were high-wear parts, and the quality of new parts has declined with time, so many Elan owners switch to an aftermarket pair of half-axles that replace the rubber donuts with either CV joints or U-joints and a sliding splined shaft. Harry was wearing a pair of the later.

The problem was that I didn’t know what brand the half-axles were, so I couldn’t click-and-buy a replacement U-joint. I posted photos to the Lotus Elan forum. Several folks responded that they looked most like half-axles from Performance Unlimited that were popular in the 1970s and 80s, but that company is long out of business. Although I hated to render the car immobile before I had a replacement part in hand, I didn’t appear to have much choice, so I pulled it out.

I hadn’t rebuilt a U-joint since my Triumph days, and seriously entertained just bringing the half-axle to the machine shop I use for valve jobs and asking him to source and install a replacement, but I watched a few videos and quickly got back into the swing of things. I removed the snap rings, banged the U-joint caps out of their yokes using a socket slightly smaller than the cap as a drift and a second one larger than the cap to support the other end and catch the other cap, then measured the joint.

Fortunately, it was nothing exotic—it was a Spicer joint with 1.063-inch-diameter cups and a length of about 3.22 inches. Searching for it online revealed that it’s in the Spicer 1310 family, and common enough that, incredibly, I was able to pick one up at AutoZone on a Sunday for $30. You have to understand how unlikely this was—you probably can’t even buy spark plugs for a vintage Lotus at a generic parts vendor like AutoZone. The fact that I could walk in there and pick up a name-brand universal joint for some aftermarket Lotus half-axle made by a company that had gone out of business decades ago was jaw-dropping.  I had the axle reassembled by the end of the day, and reinstalled in the morning.

So, with the first round of mouse abatement completed, with the front rotor no longer sounding like it’s being turned on a lathe, and with the left inner universal joint no longer doing the For Whom The Bell Tolls thing, I took Prince Harry on a few ever-widening circles around the block to make sure all was well, then went on a 20-ish mile drive.

And? How was the Prince?

Let me take a step back for a moment. Although appearance-wise, Lolita, my ratty and raw Lotus Europa doesn’t hold a candle to the sexy red Elan +2 that it now shares garage space with, the Europa is a pretty well-sorted car (after eleven years and twenty-two grand, it bloody well should be). In comparison, the Elan’s steering felt wandery, the four bent unobtanium steel wheels and the 12-year-old Vredestein tires didn’t help, the rear rotors are warped junk, and there were more thunks and clunks both fore and aft than I remembered from my short test drive. And as I described when I bought the car, it’s rough and stumbly below 3000 rpm. It has a pair of Sprint-specification cams in it, and I don’t yet know whether this is the nature of the beast or there’s something off in the fuel or ignition systems. My Europa is a better-running car.

That is, until I punched Harry’s throttle. Then, as it did during the test drive, it absolutely came alive. As with any car that does this, you want to do it again. And again. And again. The coming-on-the-cam feel, combined with the delightfully tight shift linkage, made me break into an ear-to-ear grin. I felt blessed and privileged to have bought the car, to have survived the title and registration issue, and to have broken through the wall of the immediate acute problems.

Which brings us to the mouse smell. As the car got up to speed and air began moving through the vents and into the cabin, the change in the stink situation was dramatic. Clearly the simple act of cleaning the dried urine out of the vent hoses and removing the bulk of the mouse nest from the heater box had a large effect. And no, I never caught any mice in the traps. Maybe they jumped ship while the car was still in New Hampshire.

Then I turned on the heat, and immediately shut it back off. And rolled down the windows. The idea that I was going to escape my fate of removing, disassembling, and cleaning the heater box immediately vanished. The smell, however, did not.

In addition to a proper de-mousing, Prince Harry’s punch list includes finding and fixing the source of the vague steering, getting to the bottom of the rough running (it’ll sometimes backfire like a gunshot when you shut it off), finding the source of an annoying oil leak, figuring out where the thunks and clunks are coming from, replacing the rear rotors and pads (which are quasi-inboard; they’re behind the hubs), and doing something so the U-joints don’t bind up when the rear suspension is at full droop (apparently a common issue with these aftermarket U-joint axles). Not exactly the stuff of stoic British royalty.

And that got me thinking. Maybe the car isn’t Prince Harry. Maybe it’s Meghan Markle. Lolita and Meghan in the garage? How lucky can a guy get?

(Next week, the heater box comes out. Really. I mean it this time.)