Should my car have a silver roof?

[Robbie693]

Cool - 70's rock!

Mine's a bit more understated, but it's growing on me:

[M.J.S]

Not all 130 Elans had a silver roof...my JPS is Gold



Mark, out of interest any info available on how many genuine JPS +2's survive?

Mark.

[Gordon Sauer]

Niall's car is the way the silver flake looked; when I stripped my car chemically to remove the painted over yellow finish, there was the obvious gelcoat impregnated silver metal flake--I had it duplicated by a boat dealer. Hard to imagine the last few 130's being all one color unless the roof was metalflake gelcoat--In the spirit of Chapman, unlikely he would have changed the process right at the end, since it's just as easy to shoot color over the metal flake gel coat as any other gel coat--also don't see that indicated by the usual Robinshaw/Ross, Robson, Arnold, et al. authors that beautufully detail the model, its changes and features. Gordon Sauer

[Craig Elliott]

The info in the various books on this seems sketchy, for example Robinshaw & Ross refer to the silver roof being used from Jan 1971 on +2 S130s (on Page 183!) but then on Page 187 they say that the Silver +2S roof was introduced in March 1969 (page 187) whether this refers to metalflake or not I don't know.

My car (a '72 +2S 130/5) was originally Lagoon Blue, possibly with a silver metalflake roof (although the pre-1980's restoration photo I have of it shows it being all blue). When I first bought the car I talked to the guy that restored the bodywork, Robin Alabaster, and he was pretty clear that all of the later cars had the metalflake roofs but that a buyer could specify that the car came in one colour - so the roof would then be sprayed over. He has a long history with Lotus (worked at Mike Spence's garage in the 70's etc) so is probably knows as much as anyone...

I guess finding out exactly what your car was like will be difficult - with my car the only record at Lotus was that it was Lagoon Blue. I don't know whether this refers to the main body colour or that the car was completely that colour. (Incidentally, on the JPS +2 issue the factory have counted back the number of cars the produced in this colour scheme and reckon it to be 115, as to how many have survived...)

You could find a suitably hidden spot and scrape the paint away to see what's underneath, but I suspect that that wouldn't prove anything. Even if there is shiny stuff underneath it may not have been showing when the car left the factory. Similarly if there's no shiny stuff it could mean that in the dim and distant past someone stripped the roof back to the glass and re-finished it. One of the issues with the metal-flake was that it discoloured and I've also seen instances where it degraded to a really rough finish a bit like shark skin, so it's highly possible that someone could have decided to take it right back and re-finished it.

I guess the only way to find out is to trace the car's history back to the first owner..... and hope that they can remember!

C

[Elanintheforest]

I agree with your observations regarding any written evidence, Gordon, but unless my late cars both had replacement roof panels, they never saw any metalflake.

I know that there were a lot of problems with the JPS roofs, as the gelcoat metalflake didn't work most of the time, due, I believe, to varying humidity and temperatures. Many cars had to be redone with gold metalflake paint. Apparently the problem was a 'milky' sheen on the roof, which was a lot more noticeable on the gold roofs than the silver ones.

I spoke with Graham Arnold many moons ago about the JPS, and he remembered that the JPS marked the begining of the end for the metalflake roof. The last twenty or so JPS cars had to go back to the paintshop and have their roofs and sills painted black to sell them, and at about the same time as JPS production, the silver roof Plus 2 sales fell considerably as well. The JPS was made from May '73 until October '73, not too long before the end of production of the Plus 2.

I guess that if the silver roof fell out of favour, then taking the step of adding metalflake to the gelcoat out of the process would have been eagerly taken. It was a manual process, and metalflake costs money, so the opportunity to take a few quid out of the cost of production would have been enthusiastically taken. As with many things Lotus, there is no written spec change to support this. But if nobody wanted them, and they cost extra to have, and late cars show no evidence of ever having them, I think that a reasonable conclusion can be made.

As for how many JPS cars are left Mark, I doubt that anybody knows. One of the Club Lotus Gurus on the JPS model, Dave Adkins, has researched the model carefully, and it's quite difficult to even determine how many were built. By going through the Lotus sales ledgers, he has concluded that some 109 were probably built between May and October in 1973. It's not easy to be definitive because they were never recorded as JPS cars, just fully optioned Black cars.

So the best guess as to how many are left is something like half of them, maybe less? Something around 30 - 60 cars? I know of 3 that have been scrapped in the past 5 years, just because they were old and tatty Plus 2 cars and worth more for spares, although one was sold on as a shell with ID, so may be brought back to life. It?s a shame that they haven't really been recognised as a more significant Elan, as they celebrate a very successful Lotus F1 era.

Mark