Alaskossie

Mike, Beautiful car! (Of course, I'm partial, as my Caterham Seven is also silver and carbon, but no polishing needed to keep any any aluminum bright!). Where did you get your rear fenders? I see that the c/f weave pattern on yours runs on the diagonal. My rear fenders are from Caterham, and the c/f weave pattern runs vertically; but my Millwood full-coverage c/f rock shields run on the diagonal. I'm trying to see if I can get the shields in a vertical pattern (or find some c/f wings that run on a diagonal pattern?) Anyway, something to think about while my Seven is tucked in for its long winter nap. Did you clear-coat your c/f fenders? I would strongly advise it, because c/f is porous, and eventually moisture will get in, and the sun will heat it and will create white spots that are very hard to remove, and the c/f will eventually look dull. With a clear-coat, the c/f takes on depth, and a real three-dimensional look.

A few years ago a C&D columnist or editor (Pat Bedard, I believe -- now long gone from the mag) wrote an article on his investigation of red-light camera systems in several cities. All were contracted with private firms that provided the camera and operators, for a percentage of the take (i. e., the fines). One of the contract clauses prohibited the cities from lengthening the duration of the yellow light at intersections, from a certain specified (fairly short) duration. This clause was obviously in the contract to create more yellow/red light violators, and increase the take, rather than to promote safety -- particularly if increasing the length of the yellow light by 5 to 10 seconds might actually allow people to stop before the light turned red..... This system is largely corrupt, I believe, and the private camera companies want to protect their cut of the take, to the detriment of highway safety.

i would plead not guilty and go to trial on a speed camera citation, as a matter of principle. You are entitled to confront and cross-examine your accuser. If the camera can't testify (or the operator isn't present to testify about your particular citation), the charge should be dismissed by the Court. If it is a private operator, he/she should be disqualified as having a direct financial interest in a finding of guilty. Read the column in the latest C&D about the public outcry that killed the speed-camera enforcement/revenue generation in Phoenix.

i also plead guilty to having black and silver Lotus badge on my Caterham's nose.... and on the wheel centers.... I put them there. My excuse? The colors matched my car's body colors perfectly -- the Caterham badges do not. When scannon and I attended the LOCO monthly gathering in Denver last July, I didn't hear any negative comments about my badging (and as scannon said, my car attracted more attentin in the rain than did the new Evora). Perhaps for the next LOG meet in Vegas, we should devise a back-panel sticker that says, "Slightly More Evolved Sevens" or something like that....?

Athens7, What you really need is a Seven with a right-side-exit exhaust.... but that's not a low-budget solution.

I am pricing the new parts (bonnet, windscreen, cowl, firewall) from RMSC. I'll have the painting done by a body shop up here. I may install the cowl/firewall myself, to make sure that all the special bits and bobs and brackets that I originally added to the stock firewall happen on the new one. I'm going to have Nathan Down in Boulder cut the air-intake hole in the new bonnet, just like he did on the damaged one.

Skip, Yes, but it is still "damaged goods." Tom

Here are three Seven photos shot less than an hour ago, taken into the teeth of a 50 mph autumn gale blowing down Turnagain Arm, Alaska. It was hard to drive and hold the camera steady over the windscreen, in that wind -- but I couldn't shoot through the windscreen, because salt spray from the whitecaps had completely coated it. Perhaps these are not "calendar"quality...but they show that Autumn is nearly finished already, up here...There is new snow on the mountaintops, and very soon the Seven will be tucked away for a long winter nap.

JohnCh, I recognize those Sevens! Your action photo had to have been taken on that blistering-hot day that I ran with no top, and ended up in the Emergency Room in Weaverville (I just received the hospital's bill yesterday). I learned that on that trip, and running with top up to avoid heat exhaustion, I had to take all of my action photos through the windscreen, and early in the day before the bug-splatter began to smear my forward view... I am attaching two photos from that trip, one from the PCH Hwy. 1, and the other from a point a bit further north... not "great" photos, but evocative of the particular moment.

Are there any solutions to removing baked-on road tar on the exposed part of exhaust headers (from where they exit the side skin, to the muffler)? Tar remover and 3M adhesive remover (the usual solutions for standard road tar removal) don't work. My headers are ceramic-coated (silver). While the lumps of road tar come off, a stain remains, and the tar removers just won't cut it.

I'll stand up for the Seven spare... I see the Seven spare tire as additional rear-end/fuel tank crash protecton (something you can't get in a can of Hoyt's, or whatever). Also, it gives the car a more balanced profile, and that "traditional" look, besides. Having said that, I did cut off my Caterham license plate/spare tire bracket, so that I could mount my luggage-rack system (then I re-mounted the spare tire holder). I also trimmed the license-plate light bracket off the top of the tire holder for a cleaner look (and to accommodate my center luggage rack); I am using LED license-plate lights/bolts from Summit. BTW, it is much cleaner and more square to cut the tire bracket support tubes with a pipe cutter, instead of a hacksaw (which never seems to follow the line you want it to...) .

Is that a Caterham Series 3 chassis? (didn't think a turbo would fit....) Where does the exhaust exit now? That looks like a Ford Duratec motor...what do you think the overall hp and torque figures are now?

I got the standard black Caterham mesh screen for the nose cone, and safety-wired my "7" emblem to it in 4 places, on the posts linking the "7" to its border. The wire matches the silver of the emblem, and is unnoticeable. I painted the radiator with black radiator paint, and the front-mounted Spal fan housing is black, so (as I intended), the entire area behind the nose cone is black. By the way, I had my "7" emblem made 2/3 the standard size, and I think it is better-proportioned to the nose cone opening this way. I am thinking of painting the four links between the "7" and the surrounding border black, to separate the two visually. I second the opinion on the panoramic "mirrirsforsevens" made by our bsimon -- they are just the ticket!

Attached are two photos of the damage I incurred to my new Seven in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory last Thursday morning, when a Ford Pickup backed into me. Not extensive, but a real pain to get fixed right. Any suggestions? Alaskossie

Here is a brief update on my recently-completed Colorado-Alaska trip by Seven. Some of this has been reported earlier, by my faithful contact scannon, who I was out of touch with for long stretches where there was no cell-phone coverage. I departed Greeley, Colorado on August 10, 2010, and arrived in Anchorage at 9:30 pm Friday night, August 27, after a long drive from Beaver Creek, YT starting at 8 am on Friday. It was a 581-mile drive, some of it on pretty bad asphalt. That almost equalled my longest one-day drive, 601 miles by Interstate from Salina, Utah to Los Angeles, California, across the Mojave Desert -- that was brutal! Total trip mileage was 6159 miles (9912 km) -- not insignificant, considering that it was all in a Seven. My first day and a half in Colorado was spent driving some of the dream roads that I had always wanted to cover in a Seven -- scannon should know that he lives in some of the best Seven country anywhere. I did six above-timberline alpine passes (Trail Ridge, Berthoud, Loveland, Fremont, Cottonwood, and Monarch Passes) and one long twisty road (north rim of Black Canyon of the Gunnison) in one full day, before resigning myself to the Interstates for the rest of the trip to California. i reached Los Angeles in the evening of the 12th of August, in time to meet my two-week-old new grand-daughter Grace for the first time, and to give her dad, my son Brian, his first ride in a Seven, blasting around the Santa Monica streets at night and seeing flames come out of the tailpipe from downshift backfires....I've got to get that muffler changed to something more friendly..... The whole trip was a great experience, punctuated with individual mishaps. My second full day in California day, heading to a Lotus Club breakfast before Saturday's Historic Car Races at Monterey, I lost the right rear wheel bearing (that had apparently been a problem with 2007 Caterhams, but long since fixed on most cars built in 2007 and soon afterward). I didn't lose a day, though, as Rahul (rnr on USA7s) and the local Lotus club put me in touch with a great Lotus mechanic, Rob Dietsch in Santa Clara, who dropped what he was doing and fixed my car with air-freighted parts the next Monday. My wheel-bearing incident could not have happened at a better time and place -- not in the Mojave Desert or on a busy freeway, but amongst Lotus folks who knew just how and where to fix the problem. Right after Monterey, I had the wheel bearing replaced at Rob's shop (and the left side too, just in case). I caught up with my two Seven touring companions John Christianson and Ed Hudson (in a Westfield/Duratec and a Caterham/Vauxhall,respectively) in Gualala, California, after a great solo night-time drive on Highway 1, the legendary Pacific Coast Highway, with no other traffic of any kind on the road (I met four oncoming cars, and caught up with no cars at all) -- probably the greatest 75-mile night-time driving experience of my life. Fog rolling in and out, the Botts dots in the center of the road outlining the next curve, excellent, smooth pavement, lots of variety in curves and dips -- an experience to savor, for sure. Then, the next day, after a hard, hot drive all day on the narrow, twisting, demanding back roads of north-central California at 100 degrees F., I fainted twice from heat exhaustion at our gas stop in Weaverville, CA at 6 pm, and I was taken by paramedics to the local hospital's Emergency Room, where I got 3 litres of fluids by IV, and was released at 10 pm. I slept in the next day, and caught up with John and Ed the next evening in central, Oregon, by taking the Interstate, instead of the planned back roads. They started suffering from what we think was salmonella poisoning from breakfast eggs, and weren't entirely up to par for the rest of the week. I bounced back from the heat (I ran the rest of the way with the bikini top up, and stayed out of the direct sunlight), and had no further health troubles. The three of us drove many great twisty back roads in northern California, Oregon and Washington, through the national forests, and Rainier and North Cascades National Parks, through a week ago Friday. John and Ed split for the Seattle area on the morning of Friday, August 21, and by that afternoon I had crossed over into Canada and headed up the Fraser River Canyon toward Dawson Creek, Milepost 1 of the Alaska Highway. Lots of smoke from recent forest fires in the area, but light rain was clearing the air and there were no road closures. The Alaska Highway was overall quite good, completely paved except one 10-mile section under repair but with tightly-packed gravel, and with with one 100-mile section of great, mountainous Seven road, and much of the remainder cruisable at a steady 80 mph (or faster, in a suitable car). I did not see a single police car on the entire Alaska Highway, in either Canada or the US. Quite a bit of of heavy truck traffic, mainly fuel tankers and semis, of the 8-axle, 9-axle (and even one 12-axle) "oversize load," double-trailer variety. However, there was one atrocious 250-mile stretch from Haines Junction, YT to the Alaska border. Only a relatively few potholes there, but thousands of nearly-invisible dips, ridges, valleys, diagonal crevices, bumps, etc. I spent a good part of that drive in the opposite lane, choosing the best path through the mess. The Seven is so nimble at the helm that it is like running a slalom, to find the best way through such a tangle of hidden prtoblems at a reasonable speed. The only other incident of note, unfortunately, was last Thursday the 26th in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, when a guy in a big Ford pickup backed out of a diagonal parking space on Main Street and into the right side of my car. I saw him reversing, but I was stopped in traffic, and could only blow my horn -- it turns out he was deaf in his left ear, so the warning didn't do any good. The bonnet and cowl damage is repairable of course, and the car was thankfully drivable, but this incident sort of took the glow off of what had been a successful trip up to that point. But it is the type of accident that could have happened to a Seven anywhere.... It feels good to be home. After the length of time I had spent in the car, the realization that you were so low to the ground went away, and it felt like a normal car -- but I avoided getting in and out of the car any more than necessary, since it looked and felt like clowns packing a phone booth. The Seven drew stares and questions and photos everywhere I went (which I had been forewarned about). Surprisingly, I averaged one person a day -- even in remote BC and YT -- who knew exactly what the car was -- one bush pilot in northern BC even said that he had owned one in Vancouver, 25 years ago! The rest recognized it from published road tests, Top Gear TV programs, the Prisoner TV series, or by attending car races on the East Coast or in Scotland years ago. My Seven is filthy right now -- I hope to spend much of today cleaning it up, vacuuming the small rocks out of it, evaluating the damage from the Whitehorse incident, etc. I'll post some photos of the car before, during and after, as soon as I get them onto the computer. Anyway, that's my saga, and I'm sticking to it.....

Saturday morning in Hollister, heading foer a Golden Gate Lotus Club breakfast in Salinas before the Laguna Seca Races, my Executive Superlight began lurching from side to side, like from ruts in the road, but only at the rear. At the Ihop restaurant, we jacked up the rear of the cart and found that the right rear wheel moved from top to bottom or from side to side about 3/4 inch -- not good, and undriveable. Lucky I didn't lose a wheel on the way to the restaurant on the freeway at 75 mph -- only the brake caliper and pads were holding it on. We left the car at Ihop and went to the races -- first priority, of course. Leaving the restaurant, we all pulled out, unaware that Gert's starter suddenly didn't work, and we unwittingly left him behind; he got a push from a pancake patron, and re-joined us. With good advice from Rahul and the California Lotus folks, I arranged to have my car flatbedded Saturday evening 65 miles to Rob Dietsch's Lotus Shop in Santa Clara. Rob met me there and put the car safely in his garage. I ordered repalcement rear bearings and housings (both sides) and right brake disk and pads for both sides from Ben at RMSC (I luckily reached him Saturday morning), and he overnighted the parts by UPS, and they arrived in Hollister by 10 am this morning, and I drove them in a rental car to Rob in Santa Clara, and he dropped what he was doing and got right to work, finishing up at about 4:30 this afternoon. I hope to re-join Ed and John late tonight up the CA coast, on the Pacific Coast Hwy, at our planned first night's stop on the Seven Tour. While I regret not being able to park the ESL in the Lotus Corral at Laguna Seca, at least the car is healthy and on the road once more. This would not have been possible without Rahul's good advice, and the willingness of Rob Dietch to tackle the repairs right away. Rob is a genuine good guy -- explained in part by the fact that he is a Boulder, CO native. Anyway, all's well that ends well (or at least continues well, at this point). More later..... Alaskossie

Slomove, I am still at Jeff's in Greeley, CO. I have an oil leak that we will be investigating this morning. I hope it is not serious -- could put a crimp in my tight travel plans. Otherwise, I am just about ready to launch. I had hoped to arrive in the Monterey area before Friday the 13th (no dead black cat for me) because I have a ticket for the Concorso on Friday. Alaskossie

Sean, I hope you at least get a chance to stand in front of my car next week....stationary, of course! Alaskossie

Gert, I am still in Colorado, finishing up the Executive Superlight. I doubt I will leave for LA before Saturday the 7th. I will plan to be in LA from when I arrive through the 11th, then drive to the Monterey area late on the 12th. (I have a reservation at the Weibe Motel in Hollister for the weekend). So I don't know if we can coordinate a drive from LA to the Monterey area, but I would like to. When are you planning to drive up? Yes, The Concorso Italiano is on the 13th, Friday. My error... My cell is 907-317-2600. Let's try to rendezvous. I would like to run across Sean McPartlan also, if it works out. Alaskossie

Gert, Scannon alerted me to the fact that you had posted a mesage to me on the CA trip (I don't have my computer with me). I am planning to meet my wife at our son's home in Santa Monica on Aug. 6, if I get all my pre-trip stuff done in Colorado. Otherwise, it may be a day later. (We have a one-week-old new grand-daughter in Santa Monica, our son's first child). I was planning to drive to the Moterey area on the 9th to attend the Carmel street concours the next day (which has now been cancelled due to lack of a sponsor). I have a reservation at the Wiebe Motel in Hollister beginning, I believe, on the evening of the 9th (or it may be the 10th -- I'll have to check). So I was going to be in the Monterey area from the 10th on to the end of the Historics on the 14th. John Christenson, Ed Hudson and I are planning to attend Concorso Italiano on the 9th in Monterey. I would love to drive up from LA with you, if it fits your time schedule.

I have used the Caterham factory carpet on the tunnel in my '07 Executive Superlight, held in place by HD Velcro. In the footwells, I have positioned two layers of Summit racing reflective heat fabric and one layer of carpet (all removable) at the ends of the footwells. On the floor, I have a light piece of roofing rubber membrane (commonly called "Bitchithane") against the aluminum. Then I have the Caterham factory floor carpets each fastened (also removable) to a sheet of stiff carbon fiber, with nylon-strap tabs to lift them up and out for cleaning. An added advantage of the c/f on the footwell floor is that it guards against a sharp piece of road debris coming through the floor and slicing up my legs.... i have found that over long distances in others' Sevens, it is the engine heat -- not the sun or the wind buffeting or the engine noise -- that really wears me out. So I made certain that my Seven is as well insulated against engine heat as is reasonably possible.

The BMW 6-cyl is not a very high-revving engine, for a bike. Appears to be almost like a small car engine in a bike....

It is still 7/7/10 here in Anchorage......but my car is several thousand miles away at the moment, so the only Seven motoring I'll do today is in my head. But in a few weeks it will be the jaunt from Colorado to the Historics at Monterey, California, then the week-long Oregon/Washington tour with John C. and Ed H., and then I'll point 'er North to Alaska.... Should probably be enough extended Seven motoring to last me for a while.... Thanks to Mazda and Al and all of the folks who have contributed so much to this site -- give yourselves a well-deserved pat on the back!

Kiwi, What material did you make your luggage carrier out of? Very tidy idea, and workmanship! Alaskossie

Bstr13, The bags are High Sierra brand ski boot bags, obtained from Sierra Trading Post (http://www.sierratradingpost.com/). They are a seasonal item, so they are not in their summer catalog. They were about $25 each, I think. Even though the bags are made of coated nylon, the zippers are exposed, so, I had additional lightweight nylon covers made for extra water protection. I bought several extra bags, and when my project is finished, I am sure I will have extras. (My Seven is in Colorado right now, and I won't have have access for three weeks). I'll keep you posted.