No Reverse - S1 336-08

[My S1]

Alas, they do not have an S1 service bulletin collection.

Losing Lotus Europa Central as an active site is a tremendous loss for all of us.  It is good that we can still access the old info but I sure wish they still had an up to date registry of going and a way to upload new info.  I first learned about the car that I now possess about fifteen years ago on the registry.  I contacted the previous owner and bugged him for a decade or more until I was finally able to become the new guardian of 46/0202.  Many, many thanks to Jerry for creating and maintaining that great website for so many years.

[BDA]

Sorry! I assumed it was a complete list. There was one about S2 shift linkage that might also apply to the S1.

Lotus Europa Central really is a great site and it's just a crying shame that Jerry sold his Europa and had no motivation to keep it updated. Unfortunately, it isn't being updated anymore (at all?). I know because I sent Dan a plan for engine cover struts... twice, each time he said he would post it but I never saw it (I in no way mean that as a criticism of Dan!). And you're correct that a lot of it is old - well, all of it is old - but there is still a lot of good reference material there. I showed a Corvair enthusiast the color wiring diagrams on the manuals page and some of the other articles and he was amazed at the amount of information available on such an old low production car! He had nothing like it for his Corvair! After Lotus Europa Central, This forum is the best place for Europa information, but a forum is not a good way to organize information. At one time a few of us suggested that a Wiki could be added. I think that would be a great addition but so far, it hasn't happened and it seems that Joe has enough on his plate now.

If 314159td has copies of those service bulletins, maybe he'd scan them and post them in the tech section. In the meantime, if you wait long enough, Serge might finish his video series about building an S1!

[314159td]

Can't recall quite where I saw that initially, but the manual page I posted has the jist of it. Cut the reverse spring shorter so you don't need to put so much force into the gear lever. Probably about a third of the service bulletins are worked into the various editions of the workshop manual.

Looks like it's in this upload, page 42 and onwards here: http://www.lotus-europa.com/manuals/s2work/f/s2f.pdf

[My S1]

Cutting the close out spring is tricky business.  I did it on a 914 transaxle...a couple of times.  The first try, I cut off too much of an old spring and I ground a pound of meat a couple of times passing by reveres.  Bought a new spring and cut again.  I'm close but I could do another round to make it perfect.

[jbcollier]

Mine isn't built up as stock so I can't say for sure, BUT, the wiring harness should not be sandwiched between the shift tube and the coolant pipe.  Can you reroute the harness?

The classic cause of too much play is the failure of the plastic bushings between the gear lever and the first shift tube.

[fort]

As well as the bushes below the lever, head back to the tree and check play there and maybe fully rose joint, then to the back of the gear box where there are several potential places for play. The cross shaft is a weakness with attaching bolts loose as holes oval unless plain shank bolts are not used. The lotus cross shaft steel is not the best and can break where the holes are. With everything tight the gear change can approach excellent.

[Bryan Boyle]

Alas, they do not have an S1 service bulletin collection.

Losing Lotus Europa Central as an active site is a tremendous loss for all of us.  It is good that we can still access the old info but I sure wish they still had an up to date registry of going and a way to upload new info.  I first learned about the car that I now possess about fifteen years ago on the registry.  I contacted the previous owner and bugged him for a decade or more until I was finally able to become the new guardian of 46/0202.  Many, many thanks to Jerry for creating and maintaining that great website for so many years.

That's why, when Jerry, Steve Veris, Whit Davis (RIP), and I built the documentation portion of the site, we mirrored it at my site so as to ensure that the corporate knowledge, as it were, was in multiple locations.  For a while, we were sending out CDRoms of the documentation site so folks could load it locally (my site's mirror of Jerry's is actually a network-mounted CDRom so I can get to it from the net or over my home lan).  Believe or not, some lowlife scammers were scraping the site, burning their own CDRoms, putting a label on it and auctioning it off on EvilBay.  I do know that Hethel downloaded the manuals because our PDFs were cleaner than what they had on file to run off a new batch of manuals back in the day.  Guess by 2007 or 8, all they had were multiple generations of copies down to print from; the manuals in the doc page were scanned from a never-unwrapped workshpp and parts manual.

The big issue is that the database is (was?) something that Jerry originally built in Access, and maintaining it was a highly manual process, and the backend is decades out of date.  Same was true of the Knowledge Base, but that has been updated the last I checked (https://www.prevanders.net/kb2.html)...you have to remember that by now (the Lotus Europa mailing list that started out on One List as a fork of the USENET rec.autos.lotus group, migrated to yahoogroups for years, and is now on groups.io, was founded in October 1998) has accumulated over 181,000 messages to index, sort, etc.  There is a LOT going on in the background that we take for granted. 

The Elan folks have a nice database that would serve our purpose, but it would require more than migration of a few webapps and so forth.  I had talked with Dan a year or so ago about it but have to admit that my coding skills in the latest and greatest language du jour is non-existent (maybe we should find a high school kid to do it?).

Biggest issue is time.  Those who maintain web sites can vouch for the fact that what you see takes 90% of the time you allot to it, the other 10% takes 90% of the time you have left. 

[BDA]

Interesting history. I think you’re right that time is the biggest issue. That’s why I like the idea of a wiki since the time spent would be spread over the contributors.

I know nothing about doing that however. I just looked at a list ways you can build your own wiki and… well let’s just say that it seemed a lot more complicated than I expected.

[My S1]

Kudos to Brian and all who have contributed to the knowledge base.  Thank you.

Shortening the transfer shaft solved the problem, for now, however I have no more adjustment remaining on the shaft.  As most of the joints are now weak and will continue to degenerate, I'll have to machine more threads onto it.  SJ Sportscars is helping me out with a new gear lever and bushings.  The biggest problem is the worn out cross shaft lever and rose joint.  Absolutely shot.  Does anyone have an original S1 unit in "perfect", tight condition laying around on their parts shelf that you would like to part with?