Howdy, folks. Just back from a long weekend at the Monterey Historics,
and a quick detour North to visit Mike Ostrov.
Ray you asked:
>Some questions for you. "If you could get your hands on an Elan Plus2 5
>speed, condition unknown" Would you buy it? What price would you pay?
Well, dunno. I don't think so, unless it was dirt cheap. In my view, any
candidate replacement gearbox oughta be easier (preferably *much* easier)
to get parts for than the trusty old Ford 3 rail, here in the States, and
it should be at least as robust. I don't think the Lotus 5 speed really
meets either of those criteria. Any more informed opinions on this?
>Were these trannies as nice as the Elan 4 speeds with respect to shifting
>or gear ratios?
Shifting I don't know about, but it is hard to imagine that the Lotus
5 speed would be as nice as the Ford 3 rail. The ratios are indeed
kinda lame, especially in comparison with the 2.5 first C/R 'box.
>Regarding the chapman-era archives, has anyone indexed them (broadly) for
>content with respect to the archive numbers (i.e. 9702, 9703, through
>9805)?
Nope. Let's talk about this some more. Personally, my preference would
be for the entire chapman-era message archive to be directly web
accessible, so that anyone's favorite search engine could do the indexing,
but of course it is possible (and, indeed, reasonable) that our list owner
might object to it. We may want to ask Mark Bradakis about this.
>I've poked into the Alfa swap a little and here's what I've found. The
>Alfa 105/115 transmission (from '69 to '74 GTVs) is suitable. Measures
>about 22" overall, of which 7'' is bell housing which presumably we'd
>remove, leaving 15" of gear box.
Mike Ostrov was about to provide me contact info for a Bay area guy with
a A/R gearbox equipped Elan for sale. It may very well be exactly the
same gearbox that you just mentioned. Unfortunately, the owner doesn't
know much detail about it, because the PO did the conversion. But I would
definitely like to drive this car, if I find time to get up that way again
before he sells it.
Let's talk about gathering all the A/R information into an html file to
post on the web; a dossier, as I've been calling it... Ray would you be
willing to be the coordinator of information, about the A/R gearboxes?
By the way, the problem with my '65 Elan is ignition related. It appears
that one of the two coils went wonky, but I also think it possible that a
bad igniter may have *caused* the coil to fail. We'll know more if I can
ever manage to locate a correct replacement coil, and try it.
Regards,
Erik Berg
Los Angeles
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