Tony Grasso is an Esprit owner in Arizona. A year or so ago, he decided he wanted to recover his interior. Now Tony is not like most other Esprit owners. Instead of finding a good automotive upholsterer, Tony bought a sewing machine, some leather and a sharp knife and taught himself how to redo an interior. He then started making headliners for other owners and advertising them on the turboesprit list on Yahoogroups. About the time I decided to scrap the carpeting, Tony announced he was going to do carpet sets, and he was looking for patterns for as many Esprit models he could. Soo....
Out came the carpeting. It's one thing to remove carpeting from a car if you don't care about how it looks when you are done. It's another to try and peel it up so it can be used as a pattern for its replacement. Automotive carpeting is designed to be light, inexpensive, and conform to the contours of the interior, which includes some pretty tight corners. As a result, the backing is not very strong, at least when compared with the glue Lotus used to stick it to the car.
It eventually all came out. Above is the drivers side. Tony is also going to reproduce the luggage compartment carpeting, so I took that out as well. It is all now in Arizona, serving as patterns for Tony. Sometime after Christmas, a grey set and a black set will fall off the UPS truck. Later he will turn his sewing machine to the luggage compartment sets.
In addition to removing the carpeting, I started to pull out the rats nest of an alarm that was installed in the car. It was actually well-installed. All of the wires were routed along with the rest of the wiring harnesses in the car, so finding them wasn't a problem. Its just there were a LOT of them. The driving lamps installed in the front air dam were installed at the same time, so I took those out as well. I'll need the opening for airflow to the oil coolers anyway, so they won't be missed. There is one more wire to go that seems to wind its way into the instrument cluster. That will be removed when I pull the binnacle for redying.
This is the stripped out passenger side. The hoses and cables running along the sill are the AC lines and wiring harnesses for the dash and front of the car. These hoses will be replaced, as they tend to get porous over the years, and there is no better time to replace them when the sill is out. The carpeting won't go back in until the car is on the new frame, as the carpeting is glued over the access holes to the bolts holding the tunnel to the frame. The dash will be redyed in place, as it forms a structural part of the car.
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