First, big thanks to Carlos Perez for sending me a spare carbon ring for the one I broke while rebuilding my Behr wing cell compressor. When it came in the mail without a name in the return address, and I opened the envelope, I first thought, “Oh wow, someone sent me the piece of foam that goes inside the compressor.”
Well, it IS foam, right?
But then I realized the foam was packing material to protect the fragile carbon ring.
One carbon ring to rule them all…
As I wrote a few weeks ago, I’ve since purchased an already-rebuilt compressor, but I’ll use this to put the other one back together, along with Federico Molina’s intel that what broke my carbon ring was that I had put the shaft seal o-ring in the wrong place. Thanks again, both of you!
I wrote numerous pieces in the past few months about inching forward with the resurrection of the FrankenThirty’s a/c system. The backdrop of much of it was that the work was hampered because my garage is full (the E9 and two Lotuses), so every time I wanted to work on the E30, I needed to kick the Lotus Europa to the curb. Even if the weather was decent, firing up that rare, expensive little twin-cam engine with its honey-like 20W50-weight oil to move the car 20 feet gave me the willies. And when snow was forecast, I tried to draw the line between “light snow you can easily brush off followed by warming, yes; heavy snow followed by rain and freezing; no.” It was a far from ideal situation. But I had no choice.
Forward motion in a project always has a cost.
Or did I?
As I’ve posted numerous times, in years past, I’ve put one car on wheel dollies and slid it sideways to allow me to sardine-pack four cars in the garage instead of three. This works if the cars are short enough that two can comfortably fit nose-to-nose in my 31-ft-long garage. Of course, the garage floor needs to be swept clean for the roller dollies to do their thing, but the rolling is complicated because the garage floor slopes slightly toward the back for drainage, causing rolled cars to drift in that direction as well. Ten years ago, I screwed a strip of wood down to keep a car in the top half of the garage, but the dolly wheels jammed against it, requiring me to use my Warn Pullzall powered winch to drag it over. So it’s all a production, the result of which is an extra car in the garage but zero floor space to do work.
Commencing the sliding.
Slid and stuffed. See what I mean about no room?
I’d looked at doing “the slide” before winter set in, but my E9 was already snug in the back left garage space; there were quite a few big objects behind it that prevented me from getting it within a few inches of the back wall, and thus there wasn’t enough room to slide the Lotus Europa into position in front of it, at least not without emptying the garage first and doing some major cleaning, or shuffling the cars, maybe putting the longer E9 up on the mid-rise lift and the shorter Lotus Elan +2 in the back left spot. But at age 66, my appetite for doing work just so I could do more work wasn’t what it used to be, so I let it go and was prepared to sleep in the winter-wrenching bed I’d made for myself.
The junk behind the E9 preventing me from getting it closer to the back wall. Yes the car is stored covered and I pulled the cover back to take the photo. I’m not an idiot.
But with another storm about to move in, I had an idea: If I put the Elan up on the mid-rise lift and stuck the nose of the Europa way underneath it, maybe there would be enough room to pull the E30 in on a diagonal.
Hmm.
I compared the length and width of the E30 to the available space, and it looked promising.
So I had at it. First, I made sure the E30 would start. This has, in fact, been a total non-issue; like most electronically fuel-injected cars (well, BMWs) built since the mid-1970s, you reconnect the battery, twist the key, and the thing fires up and idles like magic. Then I did the same with the Europa, which takes, well, more—a blast of starting fluid, manual choke operation, gas pedal feathering, and a humane amount of warmup. Then, I pulled the daily drivers out of the driveway to begin the dance.
I stuffed the Europa under the tail of the Elan, first pulling the wheels off the latter to get clearance.
I’d say that’s as far forward as it goes.
In doing so, the Elan’s exhaust pipe came alarmingly close to the Europa’s recently-replaced windshield.
Nah, plenty of room; I still have a thumb-width to spare.
I then eased the FrankenThirty’s nose into the garage and did the hard-left hook needed for the diagonal. I got out to check clearance and found that I didn’t have enough—I was going to hit the back corner of the Europa. So I grabbed a floor jack (it was quicker and easier than pulling the wheel dollies off the wall) and slid the back of the fragile little car to the right while carefully not cracking the windshield on its sister’s tailpipe.
I pulled the E30 further in and wanted to get out to check for clearance again, but I found that I couldn’t—the driver’s door was blocked by a stack of E30 basketweave wheels that I didn’t think would be in the way but were, and the passenger door was occluded by the corner of the Europa. I rolled down the window and tried to move one E30 wheel at a time off the stack, but it was more like a controlled tumble.
The E30 basketweaves are visible on the right, and the yellow wheel dollies are hung against the wall. Another issue is that they’re not light and not easy for me to take down.
I pulled forward as far as I dared. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough—the back of the FrankenThirty stuck out by at least a foot and a half. The takeaway is that when you’re putting a car in on a diagonal, you need to measure the diagonal of the car itself, not just its length.
And… no.
I was about to extricate the E30 when I looked in front of the garage where the driveway slopes down into it and saw that it was a sheet of ice. I was astonished that I hadn’t noticed it before. With the car still sitting on General Altimax tires that are manifestly not snow and ice tires and whose date codes read 2008 (don’t judge me—I have a new set of Petlas 195/60R14s sitting in the basement), I had an image of the back of the car losing traction, sliding sideways, and bashing its fender lips and quarter panels against the sides of the door opening. I wondered if I’d need to queue up the Nissan Armada and gently tow the thing out. But the FrankenThirty backed out like it was nothing. Then I remembered: One of the reasons I bought the car was that when I decided on its VIN, it reported that it was a true North American-issue 325is with a limited-slip differential, and despite all the booked-up work performed when its rebuilt salvage title was issued, it still has it.
That night, it snowed about six inches. Rain began to fall in the morning, and a freeze was predicted. I began to blow out the driveway, but the snowblower died (again), so there were blower mounds that froze into cement. It’ll be a while before anything goes anywhere.
Denied.
At times like this, I recall the story from the 1980s of the Wall Street stockbroker who, in hindsight, laughed when he used to say that he had a cash flow problem when what he really had was a cocaine addiction problem. I complain about my storage issues when really it should be clear to everyone, including me, that the problem is that there are too many cars. It was already at the breaking point when I bought the FrankenThirty. Requiring the car to sit outside kicked the can down the road. But then, shortly afterward, I bought the Elan +2, a lovely little Brit bit of a thing that needs to be sheltered. My 98-year-old neighbor Jeanette (the widow of “Hank the car guy,” the man who made my life hell for decades) solved my immediate problem by letting me put Hampton, the 50,000-mile survivor ’73 2002, in her unused garage for the winter. Still, now the problem was resurfacing due to needed winter wrenching space.
It’s almost March. I’ll hobble through. But when I can’t fit the project car in the garage, the ability to slip in there and do a quick 20 minutes of work suffers, and the cumulative negative effect of that is enormous. Maybe it’s big enough not to have a cold E30 when I drive to The Vintage in May.
We’ll see.
—Rob Siegel
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All eight of Rob’s books are available on Amazon. Signed, personally inscribed copies can be ordered directly from Rob here.
