Westfield Elevens

One of the myriad of issues I will address over the winter is that of loose rivets.
Do any of you other W11 owners suffer from loose ones at the side screen to GRP door shell interface? They look like alloy rivets, and pretty much all of them are a bit loose, allowing the door/screen assembly to flex in/out due to bumps and wind buffeting. If alloy rivets lasted 30 years, I guess that's not bad. I will probably squirt a bit of epoxy into the holes after I remove the old rivets so the left over ends don't rattle around inside the door shell when the screens are newly riveted.

My other curiosity has to do with the alloy panels in the engine bay. From all the pictures, it seems the newer W11's have a much more comprehensive "mud guard" section aft of the wheels. I think this is a great idea as driving through a few rain storms I discovered the tire is throwing water and sand onto the K&N air filter. It also means I have to empty out standing water or gravel from the forward side pods after every couple of drives. Have any of you fabricated improved front inner wings and mud guards?

Also, has anyone extended the bottom paneling to cover more of the under tray area (more like the real 11's)? If yes, what benefit did you perceive?

Lastly, it feels like the W11 might benefit from a front splitter below the nose at speeds at/above 90mph. Do others agree and/or what have you done about it?

Thanks all
John

Later cars attach the side screens with M5 stainless button head cap screws. For the best result you need to double up on the number / halve the spacing for an even pull down.
They also have, as you note, factory supplied GRP splashguards front and rear. I removed the rears for racing but have kept the fronts. Worth having. Easy enough to knock up in ally.
Not sure about a splitter. My car regularly hits over 100mph when racing and feels pretty well planted at that speed.
I have not played around with the underbody yet. More airflow through the engine bay would be a good thing for cooling, and a fresh air feed to the carb is on the "to do" list. Probably using one of the indicator positions for an intake.
I am thinking of cutting out the dropped seat pans of the later car and replacing them with flat panels. I'm sure the wedge shaped pans must create some up lift as the air under the car hits them, and I can get a satisfactory seating position (just) without needing to lower the floor.

Thank you Charles,
Must be my front end setup is NG . I raised the front edge of the bonnet about 3/4" with a new set of holes in the hinge plates so it no longer interfered w the top radiator bolt heads. This had caused the bonnet to crack. The front "bar" upon which the bonnet hinges is now fully below the lower edge of the nose. The instability may have gotten worse when I did this (didn't do a back to back check).

I like the idea of button screws, and they seem easy enough to do by setting new captive nuts in with epoxy.

I'll have to take some good pics of Jan's RHD car for the mud guards.

My RHD car runs the front wheel house panels that were provided in the kit. As this car is eventually going to a client I installed them as they were. For my LHD car, I am going to install abbreviated panels, that will match panels installed into the bonnet,as was done on the original Lotus 11.

Lift has not been a problem with my car, even with a top speed of over 120. It's pretty stable.

The bonnet on my LHD car is just above the mounting bar of the chassis. This is how it was set up originally.

The windscreen assembly should be installed with screws and nuts (stainless 8-32 or 10-32 with nylocks and washers are appropriate (the head type is up to you), or specialized fasteners with shoulders specifically for plexi. Rivets should NOT be used to affix the screens, or the mounting strips to the bodywork. The doors should be attached at the hinge points with rivets directly into the chassis. This was the normal way that it has been done on all the cars, early to late. The rivets will be easily retrievable as the doors are hollow.

Note: I changed out most of the metric fasteners in my new RHD car to fractional sizes so that on the road service would be easier. The chassis and engine was already fractional. Now, most of the trim and accessory fasteners are also fractional. I love Metric, but I also love carrying only about 3 wrenches! This is not a problem with the early cars, as they were all fractional.

Paneling beneath the car is not difficult, but will be time consuming, with all the holes, a cutout for the oil pan, and the length of the drive shaft cutout. My car early LHD doesn't have a floor beneath the rear axle, so if yours is that way, you will need a new single panel from the tail to the rear bulkhead.

When paneling the front, you have to make a duct for the radiator air outlet, out the bottom of the chassis, as this should be a low pressure area. This may require re mounting the radiator so that the air flow is in, down and out. Most of the cars have the radiator slanted forward, which would make the air have to do a U turn prior to exiting through the narrow duct. I would make a new radiator that slanted back (or stands straight up against the front frame bulkhead, as in an original Lotus 11), mount the fan on the back side, and give the air an easy in/easy out route.

I built a special radiator for my RHD car, with an under car cooling air exit in mind. Pictures are in my gallery on either W11 Yahoo site. The cooling is far better than the stock Spridget unit, and it weighs less than 1/3rd as much, at only 1kg. It's a double pass, so that both inlet and outlet hoses are on the same side, which cleans up the engine compartment plumbing. It needs only an 8" fan to handle the cooling in traffic or slow hill ascents.

My guess is that your front end setup is wrong, which is causing your instability problems. ALL of the cars that I have serviced, even the early ones, have severe toe out. All were aligned by "professionals". I find this amazing as all of the cars, from new construction to 30 years old, never corrected. It appears that the front ends were setup without the driver sitting in the car, and the tie rods and tie rod ends were never properly modified (cut to length). This includes the car owned by the moderator of the Westfield_Eleven Yahoo site. He had been driving his car with an inch of toe out from the first drive... About 30 years! No wonder he said that the steering was "twitchy" and didn't need a faster ratio!

Anyway, you can't approximate any front end setting without the driver in the cockpit, or equal weight in the seat. The easiest way to set the toe is with a set of Longacre toe plates, or you can make your own flat plates to go against the wheels, and use two tape measures to get your toe measurement. Very fast and easy to set up, and can be done with only one person. Much easier than a toe bar, and less expensive than a laser or optical toe gauge. Just as accurate, though.

One more thing. I often find loose rivets, so I drill them out and replace them. I also use a power riveter as it makes things so much quicker, and really pulls the alloy or steel rivets tight.

Note that if you use steel shank rivets, you will have a hard time drilling them out to replace them, or to do service. Think very carefully about what materials you use, and the installation/removal procedures with this car. Sometimes, you have to take stuff apart...

Jan,
Interesting .... my car has pretty much a full rear floor pan. It collects loads of road debris and you can't wash it out as there are no drains (I drilled some after our recent wet weather). It's only missing some nice plastic inner wheel housings (panels) like your RHD build.

I agree wrt using alloy rivets wherever possible because they're so easy to remove if necessary.

A long time ago I got tired of paying someone $125 to set toe on my BMW's (that's all which is adjustable) so I made up some alloy plates. I only have one tape measure so I draw lines on the ground. It get's me to within 1/16", which has been fine so far

I am not really enamored with the plastic wheel housings, as they get in the way of everything, from battery removal to the removal of the rear arms, and the adjustment of the brakes. I purposely left them off the RHD build, and simply blow the debris out of the rear floor, or wash it with a pressure washer. The work of cleaning is far easier than having to work on the rear end with the wheel housings in place, or removing the rear wheels, then the housings, to do simple things like servicing the rear arms for new bushings. The supplied wheel housings are sitting on a shelf in the shop, with many of the other parts I left off. I really feel that ease of maintenance beats the problem of a bit of sand in the rear pan any day. Drains are not really needed (the dirt washes over the frame rails, or can be vacuumed out), but you could put in some louvers if you wanted. Note that the alloy to steel interface has plenty of silicone RTV sealer to prevent any rust. I drive the car in the rain occasionally (as I did yesterday, in a T storm, with a new girlfriend... ). It doesn't seem to make much difference. Nothing back there that gets hurt by water. Besides, the rest of the car is open anyway.

Anyway, the wheel housings don't really work. Even with my easy drives about the neighborhood, the front areas behind the bulkheads are already filled with sand that hand to be blown out. The thing gets just as dirty as my stripped out LHD car as water and debris get in via the tunnel. .

Use two tape measures, it's a lot faster than drawing lines, and more accurate. You can get a good measurement in less than 5 minutes if you have the weights to put on the seat. I occasionally will string the chassis to check the rear axle alignment against the front when I am finished. This is not a problem if you keep up with the rear bushings.

Usually, the extra charge for doing the BMW is due to the 4 wheel alignment procedure, setting the toe at both ends and taking the thrust out of the chassis. The charges for this are much higher in your part of the country. Here, a full 4 wheel alignment is about $80~100, even at the dealer level for my Mercedes, which has lots of adjustments.

It's likely that the Texas hillbillies that had my car cut out the rear floor as the diff may have touched it, and it was too technical to get a power nibbler and open up a hole for it to drop through. The guy was an F4 pilot, and the stuff he did to that car... There was a lot of haywire technology (used to hang the oil cooler up front as the hoses in the kit were too short, and the thing was upside down, so it would not fill), bits of plastic held in place with tie wraps in lieu of proper radiator ducting (which served to deprive the radiator of needed cooling air). Really sad stuff. I am still correcting things after nearly a decade of ownership. The guy even did a video about his amazing "improvements" which every W11 needed.

Found the front end problem. Somewhere in the last 300 miles, my front spax shocks stopped damping. One is clearly leaking fluid. I will go with a set of AVO's for cost reasons.

When you go to the AVOs, you may find that you can't get the same length. If you go .5" longer than your SPAX, the dampers will be long enough so that the upper arms will rest on the steering rack at full droop.

If presented with that compromise, go with the dampers that are .5" shorter. This will save your rack gaters, and allow the steering to offer travel when the car is on jack stands being serviced.

Make sure that you use the small diameter dampers (which you should have on the car), rather than the large diameter dampers, as the large diameter dampers will foul the upper arms at the spring hats. If you happen to have the very long standard springs, you can replace them with a new, shorter and easier to install spring at 7" length, 350 lb/in. Stick to the smaller diameter 1.9" springs and damper bodies.

Front damper measurements for the new cars: 9.5 compressed, 11.5 extended 7" 350 lb/in spring 1.9" diameter. Use this spring spec if you have the 10 or 12" , low rate springs, mainly to simplify the spring installation on the new dampers and chassis setup.

Your front SPAX are probably 12.5" long, and this should be considered the safe limit. I believe that the AVOs will be .5" shorter.

The rear dampers are probably gone as well. Mine went within 50 miles of the front failure. 12.5 extended, 10" closed with the bump stop installed. This uses an 8" spring, 200 lb/in. You might want to go with less rate in the rear, perhaps 175 lb/in.

Your SPAX may be 14" long. AVO selection will be shorter as well.

If you can duplicate the damper lengths used in the current kits, that's OK. You can go longer if you need to, but not longer than the SPAX extended measurement. You have about .25" leeway on the damper compressed measurement. If you can duplicate your SPAX measurements, that would be perfect. If you can't, go .5" shorter. That should match the AVO catalog available dampers.

While I have been using the AVOs for several years, they too have problems with leaking, and mine will need replacement in the near future. The AVOs also have problems with high force/velocity or high speed damping. The rears, when presented with a high speed compression, will lock at half travel, making the ride much harsher, and causing the rear to jump sideways mid corner. The rear adjustments are effective, but only the first two clicks. The third will lock the damper solid. Not very progressive, but with the chassis set up properly, the second click will adjust the chassis to a very slight over steering balance. One click in the front is usually sufficient for just about all conditions, including the track.

The fix is the Protech double adjustable. MUCH more expensive (about $1,300 shipped), but they actually damp through their entire travel, offering a far better ride, and much better handling. If you decide to go the Protech route, let me know, as I have a car running them now. We were able to optimize the length and stroke, as well as a spec for Protech's set up. Order direct from Protech in the UK.