Update by Tim Suddard to the
Lotus Elan project car
Jan 17, 2018
Here are the original lights being taken apart.
The restored lights look much nicer.
Our car was originally equipped with Lucas 12-volt, 7-inch, round sealed beam headlights. Since our car had not moved under its own power for some forty years, it still had its original headlights. While one still tested good, the other was badly cracked and no longer useable. Thankfully, RD Enterprises had a used one they let us have.
From there we media blasted and painted the buckets, cleaned the original wring in our ultrasonic cleaner and repaired one wire where it had been cut and badly spliced before. This repair involved carefully soldering the broken wire and wrapping heat shrink over the repaired area. As this wire is deep in the fender, the repair will not be able to be detected once the car is reassembled.
While the inner and outer chrome headlight rims were at least driver quality, they were not concours quality. Again, RD Enterprises came to our rescue. They had both the outer rim and the smaller inner rim that holds the headlight into the bucket in stock at very reasonable prices. Spending $10-20 for new rims is much cheaper than rechroming original pieces.
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