📓 Journals How Hard Could It Be?

[Time2Fly]

This journey started with the Elise. I had seen the Top Gear episode where Jeremy drove it, and I was hooked. It took several years before I was in a position to buy one, but before that happened I got the chance to sit in it. Well I couldn't get out of it without scooting my butt backwards onto the asphalt. Clearly not the car for me then. I still followed the development and was in love with the evolution into the Exige. I knew I still couldn't fit it in though and so I just checked them out wistfully. Then they made the Evora and honestly I wrote Lotus off. From the Esprit to the Elan to the Exige the cars were so nice to the eye, and the Evora was such a departure and an aesthetic letdown.

Then I saw the Emira. That product launch blew me away, and from the moment the configurator was live I would play with it every day. Building my spec, spinning it around to appreciate the curves and lines. I wanted it in a proper British green, but the only option was Dark Verdant. It comes alive in the sun, but otherwise it's pretty subdued. An almost off-black spruce green that combined with the lower black pack hides and minimizes the lower shape of the car. And then I saw @Eagle7's render on this forum and I was sold.

Perfection! The brightness not only draws the eye down but also visually highlights the pinched waist, making the car appear thinner through the middle. Okay, so that's what I was going to do. All I had to do was get one and modify it a little. And how hard could it be?

Turns out, it's pretty hard. But worth it.

If you want to know how the stock car got to where it is now, follow along below.

 

[Time2Fly]

I was fortunate to slip into a test drive in November of 2022, and placed my order then. The next two years were spent trolling these forums, figuring out my mods, and accumulating the parts.

The door sills were a must, obviously. Some bad influences on here convinced me that winter tires and wheels, and some carbon fiber bits, and maybe an intake system, and a phone charger, and while we're at it a phone charger, dashcam, replacement gaiter, or maybe no gaiter would be ideal.

Okay, maybe I wanted to be convinced.

Where to start though?

The door sills of course.

I could have saved some money and just taken off the sills from the car and had them painted, but that would mean thirty days off the car waiting for the paint to cure so it could be PPFd, and I didn't want to mess with the PPF on the rest of the car which means this had to be ready to go when the car arrived.

I contacted Gary Dunster at Bell and Covill. I honestly can't say enough good things there. He's helped out with more than just parts. I ordered up a set of sills in January of 2024 before my car was even locked in. For anyone wondering they're 321 GBP each. I also arranged for a local car restorer to paint them. This is where things went sideways. The original plan was to do the LOTUS lettering as a decal and PPF over it. Well, that would leave little voids around the letters. I could apply the decal over the PPF, but that would mean it would need to be replaced as this area would see grit. The restorer convinced me that they could paint the letters and sand it flat enough that you couldn't feel it. Clearly that's the best way to go, yeah?

As it turns out, yes. But only if you have a very good idea where it's going. I was able to make contact with someone at the factory and they gave me what I thought was good intel, complete with a picture against a ruler. 3" from the rear end of the sills is where the letters should start. Anyway this is where I made my biggest and most costly mistake: I hedged my bets on the info, and even pushed them out quite a bit, but went ahead with painting them in March, mere weeks before I toured the factory the first time.

During the tour I was able to check out the car close up. It was painfully obvious that the letters were done way too far back. In fact the door sills go back almost ten inches from where you see them emerge from under the rear fender.

My newly painted letters were going to barely show. At best I'd see L and S.

The painter was sympathetic, but we agreed that I should wait until I could measure it on a car before they would paint it again. Thanks to CARB approval, that took until mid April when the first ones arrived at my dealer and I could measure this in person. I brought my template and the mis-painted sill and laid them near the car.

We settled on 16" from the rear edge.

As you'll see in the following pages, they look amazing. But this was thousands in repainting that I could have saved myself.

 

[Time2Fly]

The delivery:

The car arrived at the dealership in July of 2024. If you've never seen Dark Verdant in person in the California sun, you're missing out. This doesn't even convey the depth of the color, and it's so good just in the video.

This is where the work starts.

You see, while I was waiting for my car to be built I had gone through the manual, and discovered that the door sills are one of the first bits of bodywork to go on the car. In fact the manual says you have to take it all the way down to here.

I'm kidding. That's my chassis on step three of the assembly line though. In all honesty though, the manual called for removing the wheels, wheel arch liners, front and rear underbody panels, front and rear bumpers, front and rear fenders, and the sill finishers (the bits under the EMIRA aluminum trim you see when you open the door). This was, per Lotus North America, a twenty-hour job. Fortunately I had lined someone up to do the work.

Then they backed out, as did three other companies, leaving me only a month from delivery realizing I could bin the twice-painted parts and consider it a total loss, or take the project on myself.

Hey, what could go wrong?

Anyway, two weeks later it was at my home.

And thirty minutes later...

This is the face of a proud Emira owner who thinks that if you have the service manual it'll be a piece of cake.

At least the first modification was.

Non-marking .5" gaffers tape. I wound one layer of it facing sticky side out first, then three wraps around. This way as it gets dirty I merely unwrap one layer. Repeat twice more before you have to start over.

@silent cilantro's awesome mag-safe charger! Modified to fit my phone and case. Seriously, this guy is great. And the product is absolutely professional.

And then I started pulling panels.

 

[Time2Fly]

Okay, some of this will be well organized and some of it wont. Things happened in a pretty haphazard way mostly because I kept hitting stumbling blocks.

For those of you who have a service manual, you've probably noticed that some things aren't exactly accurate. All I can say is take lots of pictures, work one panel at a time, and put all the fasteners in labeled baggies.

By the end of the first night, some seven hours later, this is what it looked like:

Skipping some steps. It turns out my hunch was correct. You don't have to remove the front and rear fenders to remove the upper door sills.

Here's what you do have to remove, and the order I would recommend if you only want to swap these.
Labeled pictures below as I feel appropriate:

Wheels: Easy. Five lug bolts.

Wheel arch liners: Pretty easy. Take pictures. Unscrew the scrivets and pop them with a trim tool, and remove the bolts.

Sill finishers: A pain. Order replacements first. They sit in a cutout so you're likely to bend them. Slip a trim tool under them and pry while warming them with a hairdryer. They're also only $14 each, so... Don at Auto Europe got them for me.

Upper sill trim: Easy: Just a few screws under the sill finisher.

Rear fender finisher: Moderately easy. One screw under the front edge and then pop it out from the bottom first by prying. A piece of foam will fall out. Put it...somewhere when you put it back.

Remove the three bolts revealed.

Side vent: Kind of a pain. Use a magnetic screwdriver. Two screws and three clips hold it in.

Remove this screw that's revealed behind it:

Remove the two circles bolts seen from the rear wheel arch. Leave the other three alone for now.

Trailing edge of the front fender. There are two screws you need to remove. One is pictured and circled in blue. Remove it and the one about a foot above it that serve the same function to hold that piece of the fender in position. Once you have, flex it out of the way and remove the two bolts circled in yellow.

Upper Sill. Pretty straightforward and easy. Remove the seven screws from the underside where it joins the underbody, and then the several screws from above that you revealed after you removed the upper sill finisher. Then, you can flex the front fender away and swing the front pieve out, and by tugging at the bottom of the rear fender you can slide the upper sill forward and out looking like this. In the picture below I've removed the three screws that I said above not to remove yet. You can do that now.

To reinstall them, just go in reverse. When reattaching the front fender pay attention to the lie of the body panel. Close the door first and make sure the fender isn't twisted as you want the body to flow.

If you are inserting replacement door sills like I did, you will need to get rivnuts installed. They do not come like that from parts. I went with stainless, but that crushed the panel a little. Stock rivnuts pictured.

That's it. You'll have this when you're done.

 

[Time2Fly]

Front bumper: Right pain in the ass.

Necessary if you want to swap the front vents (for CF like I did, or for the ones with fog lights when they come available)
Remove the screw at the bottom corner of the bumper, and this tiny anchor screw circled here.

The dashed lines are where the clips are. We'll defeat those later. You will need an assistant.

Underbody panel: Easy. Take lots of pictures. Put the screws in baggies.
Access Hatch: Easy. Three covers near the windshield pry off. revealing three bolts. Use something highly magnetic. Open the hatch and prop it up. Remove the screws revealed at the front of the car under the front edge of the hatch.

Bumper: Biggest pain in the car. I'm trying to find a picture of the clip to explain what needs to happen.

Okay, no picture. Tape the edges of the panels. You need to wedge a thin trim tool in between the panel and the clips. Have your assistant pull at the bumper from the wheel arch area as you get your trim tool in there. If I recall the clips come at it from the top. So the trim tool is above the panel lip and you're trying to lift those clips out of the way. As you get each one the edge of the panel can be pulled a little. There's four or five. Once you're done, do the other side. After that it's easy. From the front, lift the bottom edge of the bumper away and it will swing up and off. Again, being careful of the wings of the bumper. The stock diffuser and front vents are pretty straightforward. (I'll add pictures later)