DLW

Cool. :cheers:

How many of you have a food truck (such as a taqueria or sandwich shop on wheels) on the premises of the local junkyard, and what's the food like? A lot of Se7en and handcrafted car people, particularly Locost builders and builders of one-offs like the Midlana, frequent the junkyard for parts, and one member I know of for sure works at one. (you're reading his thread right now.) At the junkyard I work at, there is a really good taqueria truck in the parking lot, favored by both customers and employees. I avoid packing my own lunch whenever possible, since the food is excellent and fairly priced.

Woo-hoo! The Women's Christian Temperance Union! :party: *takes a sip of Guinness for each woman in the photo* I actually knew an old bartender whose mother took him to WCTU meetings in the 1920s and early 30s, he told stories of their rhetoric and ideologies to anyone in the bar who'd listen.

I nominated the first-gen Lotus Elise, it was absolutely beautiful, even more so than the current model. But no Lotus body styles look better than the Six, Seven and Eleven to me.

When I finally build my Se7en, I plan on using thin grooved rubber matting bonded to the floorpan. No carpet for me, I don't even like it in my house or my daily-driver, but am stuck with it as far as the house goes since I'm renting. At least rubber mats are readily available for my daily!

Any ideas on running a dry sump on an Alfa Romeo-engined Se7en? (four-cylinder or V6)

I inhabit a large automobile-dismantling shop from 7am-3pm Monday through Thursday, but as for a space to build a Se7en, I have a very small one-car garage with a good-sized driveway, space for 3 normal cars side-by-side out front, and have access to a 10-foot metal carport that could easily be tarped all around for privacy. I would have to dispose of all donor cars quickly due to neighborhood regulations, but considering where I work, that wouldn't be an issue if I had a title or a bill of sale.

That is a problem... looking again at the ad and closer at the car, it seems as though this is a Locost made with a few Caterham parts, if even that, and that the sellers may be trying to rook buyers. If you were to take this to a Caterham club meet or even call it a Caterham at a car show, you'd get laughed out of the show at best or banned from further meets/shows at worst.

Now that's something, when a newbie knows something an admin doesn't!

Not a follower of Hollywood, but I found it absurd that Twizzlers licorice became a must-have snack food after word got out that Lindsay Lohan ate them in jail. My local soft-rock radio station even gave away a 5-pound box of them recently.

Nice, and stuff like a normal windshield, tonneau and weather gear can be made easily if one so chooses, but why put a teak dashboard in a Se7en? I think those belong in Jaguar SS100 and MGTD replicas and not Se7ens.

Hello, Dino... welcome to USA7s.

No thanks, a Westfield SEight, supercharged Brunton Stalker or a Hartley H1 V8-powered Locost will do it for me.

7 HEAVN SE7EN K8RHAM LITENSS (Lightness) ADLTNS (referring to "Add lightness")

Thanks... but I don't even have the frame yet, and I may take you up on your offer if/when I build a frame or modify an existing one.

No, more along the lines of a McSorley 442-style chassis.

The birch plywood idea was more about adding durable support to the seats without springs or frames than actually showing off the wood, but foam-padding and upholstering the rear bulkhead and doing the same with the floor, albeit with slightly thicker foam. I could possibly buy some foam, neoprene or marine vinyl, a couple cans of spray-on adhesive for the cost of one large sheet of birch plywood and the saw blades needed to cut it, and if I decided that proper lower seat cushions were needed, I could get jumpseat cushions out of something like a Ford Ranger for around $5 at work. Given my size, though, I probably wouldn't need to put any kind of seat cushions in. Thinking back on colors and logos, a common Super 7 circular badge with the whole car painted BRG sounds better. As for foul-weather gear, I plan to do something along the lines of that described in "Build Your Own Sports Car" by Chris Gibbs since it rains much of the year in my neck of the woods, and when I say it rains, it rains a lot. If built, this Se7en would likely replace the full-size Chevy van I drive now except for carrying more than will fit in the Se7en's passenger's seat and on long trips. Any ideas on a lightweight fabric? I intend to use copper or aluminum tube stock to construct the frames of the top and side curtains, but don't know what to use for the side-curtain windows. BrunnyS1, there are many Alfa Romeos in junkyards or for sale inexpensively with good mechanical parts but awful bodies/interiors, and I would use little more than the transaxle, rear De Dion suspension, brakes, driveline and front hubs, an Alfetta bellhousing and flywheel, and the engine out of a Spyder, unless I ran across an Alfetta, in which case I'd use the engine too and not a Spyder engine with an Alfetta bellhousing and flywheel.

During lunch and coffee breaks at work today, and cleaning up after I got home, I thought of Se7ens regularly. Some ideas I came up with: Any year Alfa Romeo Alfetta/Milano/GTV6 transaxle- aluminum case, relatively inexpensive, well-engineered. Alfa Romeo DOHC 2-liter four-cylinder out of Alfetta or Spyder, converted to carburetors and an Alfetta bellhousing and flywheel if Spyder engine is used- simpler than the Alfa Romeo "6C" V6, as well as more adaptable to a vintage esthetic. VDO Cockpit Black gauges, Momo Prototipo steering wheel, lightweight/space-saving "seats" made of birch plywood and memory foam with neoprene upholstery and grommets for harness-type seatbelts, attached directly to rear bulkhead and floor Front suspension featuring unequal-length control-arm architecture with tubular A-arms, coilover shocks and hubs from transaxle donor. Minilite-replica wheels, wider in back than in front, with performance tires Red paint on fiberglass fenders and nosecone to honor the Alfa Romeo(s) that would give their parts, with polished aluminum bonnet, rear panel and side panels, maybe an Alfa Romeo badge on the nose where one would find Lotus, Caterham, Westfield or Birkin badges on conventional Se7ens. I've pretty much settled on an Alfa Romeo as a donor if/when I build a car, since that is one of my favorite factory-built makes and they are abundant in parts-car/donor condition due to poor build quality and rust. If this car gets built, I'll definitely put a thread with pics on this site, and if I like how it turned out, I may try something more complicated, like a III or Eleven replica or even a recreation of the first Lotus.

Louvers on the bonnet are great, and in a few cases, they are OK on the lower edge of the panels on the side of the engine compartment. But when you cover practically the whole car with them, it's another story. The interior in this car is awful, with the Grant GT steering wheel, engine-turned dash and Miata seats ruining the esthetics. One would most likely have to strip this to the spaceframe to make anything remotely attractive from it.

Thanks, escondidoron... I have been pricing out Porsche and Alfa Romeo transaxles, sketching designs for rear-suspension and transaxle areas in a McSorley 4-4-2-style space frame, and I would probably use birch plywood with memory foam bonded on and vinyl or neoprene upholstery, attached to both the floor and rear bulkhead to save space and weight, as seating. Any thoughts on engines? I personally thought that the Porsche or Alfa Romeo engines would be easiest as far as bolting up, but something like a Ford 2.3 or Ford Motorsport Kent repro, a Toyota 22R or a rotary would be easier to set up since there wouldn't be any computers to deal with.

Some Corbeau Clubmans or even Porsche 914, MR2 or Miata seats modified to take three-point shoulder harnesses would be greatly preferable IMHO. Were I to buy this, I could get many of the parts needed to finish it properly at work.

Thanks, Scott. I'm already engrossed in rereading the Se7en books, and have donor cars on the brain.

Great comment, and to Sevnn, great idea for a seat. I'll probably use something to that effect if/when I get around to building a Se7en, and that was similar to the original "seat" in the first Lotus Sevens- two thin cushions roughly sized to fit Colin Chapman.

A smidgen more practical than the usual, with the covered trunk, but the overall look is that of a mashup of a Six, a Seven and a 1932 Ford roadster. It could look pretty good given the right paint, wheel and interior treatments, though.

I would suggest pulling the engine/transmission of the Caterham and selling them while still in the UK, cleaning it from stem to stern, removing the wheels and shipping it to the USA, installing a DOT/EPA-compliant engine and registering it as a kit car or assembled vehicle. Many people have done this with late-model Loti such as early Elises, 340Rs, as well as TVRs and Marcos, and I have even heard of people doing it with Mexican and Brazilian Volkswagen bugs, of all things. Registering it as a normal vehicle rather than an assembled/kit car would be difficult and potentially illegal AFAIK, but unless you are planning to register the Se7en in California, the kit-car registration would not be a problem.