Oil, Leather and Leather Oil

The blog has been pretty quiet lately, partly due to work, partly due to slow, sure, but unexciting progress. I have been treating the door panels, center armrest, and center console panels with Leatherique rejuvenation oil. This stuff really works well to rehydrate old leather. It works best with the old dye removed, which, as you may recall, we did in the last blog installment. I have been treating the leather every day or two with the oil, massaging it in on every surface. It is about done, as it takes almost all day for a treatment to be absorbed. Next step is to fill a few small nicks, cuts and scratches with their filler, followed by a prep solution treatment and airbrushing the dye onto the panels. These panels will be dyed the original grey. I will do the leather below the windshield and the instrument cluster in black to cut down on glare. The rear panel will be grey, as will the seats. I haven't decided if I want to do the rest of the dash in black or in grey. My '83 Esprit has a black dash with tan leather for the rest of the interior and I really like it. The car is black, so that may have something to do with how well the black dash works. I'm not so sure with the blue car yet.

Dave Cammack, another multiple Esprit owning LOON, brought the front valance from his X-180R down to the barn over the weekend. He was doing some radiator work and as long as he had it off the car we wanted to see how well it would line up with the G-body contours. As you can see from the photos, with the trailing edge of the valance even with the front wheel arch, the valance extends in front of the bumper by about a half inch. Otherwise, it fits to the lower part of the bumper and the radiator duct pretty well, all things considered.





One problem that you can't see very well in the photos is the contours of the valance. The original valance has negative radius (concave) curves on the sides of the valance, where the X-180R part is convex. It just doesn't look right. Part of that may be the white color against the metallic blue, but it would still be a big difference when compared to the side sills and rear valance.

Side to side, the X-180R valance winds up pretty much where I thought it would - about an inch wider than the 87 valance. This could be made up with a light shell panel to blend the trailing edge of the front bumper to the leading edge of the front wheel arch below the bonding seam, but that will probably make the car look nose-heavy. Another possibility would be to see how an SE front bumper cover would look, but that would be even worse when compared to the squarer contours of the rear bumper and valance.





Tim Engel, another multiple-Lotus-owning LOON had a spare '87 valance he has donated to the cause. We talked about some ways to modify this valance to fit the contours of the newer radiator duct while maintaining the design elements of the car. We can pull molds off of the valance of my '83 to make some splitters to duct air into the radiator duct and the brake cooler ducts. This would take some cutting and glassing back together the front part of the duct to extend it further forward and to widen it. We also discussed ways to accommodate the oil coolers along the sides without having to mess with as radical of a false panel behind the front bumper. Dave also suggested abandoning the V8 oil coolers and going with smaller, more common coolers from an aftermarket supplier. At this point I am thinking I will build up some wooden models of the various coolers available to see how they will fit. If I can find something that would work in the original width of the valance, that may be the way to go. The V8 coolers are probably overkill for the application, so I can give up some cooling capacity for space. Time to break out the table saw...