Building an R1 Powered Seven


A few years ago I got it in my head to build a kit car. After months of searching I came across the Locost concept. In short, quite a few amateur hobbiests around the world have built their own Lotus 7 inspired cars from scratch, following plans available on a variety of Internet sites and published in a book by Ron Champion.

I started gathering parts and finally began building the chassis in July '05. In August '10 the car was titled, licensed and is now street legal. The following blog captures the progress of the build and driving experiences after completion.

Blog Posts

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Saturday, February 16, 2008

Diff Painted

I cleaned up the diff last night and painted it today using caliper paint. Hopefully it holds up. The color is lighter than I was expecting...but not a big deal since no one will see it...

I was planning to use the same color for the calipers, but may go with a darker gray or black after seeing this.

Posted by r1.se7en at 4:42 PM

Saturday, February 9, 2008

Painting in the cold

I made a small spray booth for painting the suspension components. To paint, first I warmed up the garage with a propane heater and used a small electric heater to add some additional heat to the booth. I used a respirator when spraying, then closed the front curtain of the booth and opened the garage to air out the fumes. The little electric heater kept the temp in the booth high enough for the paint to dry quickly (60-70F)

Once the paint dried to the touch and fumes subsided, I moved the parts to the basement to fully cure.


This set-up should work well for painting the remaining small parts. I'm still hoping for a warm day to paint the chassis...

Posted by r1.se7en at 6:24 AM

Saturday, February 2, 2008

Prep for painting

I started cleaning up some of the suspension parts for painting. I'm using simple green as a degreaser, followed by a rust desolving gel (phosphoric acid based). This seems to work very well, but the mess and fumes (from the rust remover) are a little worse than expected, so I'm not sure I want to do everything in the basement. Also, once the metal is prepped, it should be painted within a day. If it were summer, that wouldn't be a problem. But finding a place to do all this indoors is more of a challenge than expected.

In the mean time I ordered some more stuff from JC Whitney.

Insulation for tunnel
http://www.jcwhitney.com/autoparts/ItemBrowse/c-10101/s-10101/p-100000328424/mediaCode-ZX/appId-100000328424/Pr-p_CATENTRY_ID:100000328424

Fender welting
http://www.jcwhitney.com/autoparts/ItemBrowse/c-10101/s-10101/p-100000235653/mediaCode-ZX/appId-10729232/Pr-p_CATENTRY_ID:10000023565310729232

Seat belts
http://www.jcwhitney.com/autoparts/ItemBrowse/c-10101/s-10101/p-100000170017/mediaCode-ZX/appId-100000170017/Pr-p_CATENTRY_ID:100000170017

Also bought a Harbor Freight air riveter to save some time when fastening the aluminum panels. Now I need to buy an air compressor...
http://www.harborfreight.com/cpi/ctaf/displayitem.taf?Itemnumber=93458

Posted by r1.se7en at 6:41 PM

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Slideshow of Build Progress