Hi Mart,
The trouble is these cars are all 25+ years old now and each one has been treated differently by different owners so it sometimes becomes difficult to tell what is and what isn’t “original” on each car.
I’m still in the early stages of researching all this stuff in detail but I’m happy to share my current thoughts. (By the way, I’d like to point out that I don’t have a particular agenda to argue or a case to prove here, I’m simply interested in the history of these cars and how they were put together.)
stunned_monkey Wrote:5565 (?) has a beautifully crafted underbonnet floor that puts the shared brake and clutch reservoir exactly where the brake master -would- be if it were a mirror image of a left hooker.
Do you mean that the boot floor has been cut out and re-made so that the spare wheel space has been moved over to the left (where the BMC is normally located) and the master cylinder access panel has been mirrored onto the right hand side? If so, then VIN# 12173 has this same set up too, which is interesting since it’s from a different “batch” of RHD cars.
stunned_monkey Wrote:#12171 had its shared reservoir where the clutch reservoir usually sits.
I’ve started looking for patterns among the Wooler-Hodec cars (and the AXI cars) to try and see why such a small amount of cars can differ so much. I have a photo showing two cars outside the Wooler-Hodec works in Feb ’82. Although it’s a low-res photo you can clearly see that the cars have federal spec tail lights and no rear license plate bezel. This is how they would have been set up at Dunmurry as we know that the 1981 cars had their rear fascias drilled and license plate bezels fitted once they reached the US. The “Euro-spec” tail lights were a post-factory retrofit item, implemented by Gerry Castle, nothing really to do with the fact that the cars were RHD or Eurospec prototypes.
Do you know whether VIN# 12171 ever had the “Euro” tail lights fitted or if it has had a new rear fascia at any point? I notice that when Daniel sold VIN# 12171 a little while back it didn’t appear to have had holes drilled in the rear fascia to fit a rear licence plate bezel and it was running on federal spec lights. This would seem to indicate that it is running its original Wooler-Hodec set up.
Not all of the RHD cars had the Gerry Castle rear light conversion. Examples here would be VIN# 12176 (Dusty), VIN# 12177 and VIN# 12178 (OGH 486Y). We can trace VIN# 12178 back to January 1984 when it appeared in “Performance Cars” magazine wearing its original federal tail lights and no rear licence plate bezel. When Chrispy unearthed VIN# 12176 (Dusty) it too had its original federal tail lights and no rear licence plate bezel. Interestingly both these cars have the single brake servo set-up.
When we saw VIN# 12177 at Lotus 2006 it was wearing federal tail lights and had never had any holes drilled in the rear fascia to fit a rear license plate bezel. It would be interesting to see what servo set-up VIN# 12177 is running.
VINs 5565, 12173 and 5638 all have the twin brake servo set-up. These cars are a mixture of autos and 5-speeds and are from different “batches” of RHD conversions, but they all have another thing in common: they all had the Gerry Castle rear light conversion.
Conclusive evidence? No, I wouldn’t say so at this stage, especially since VIN# 12179 had the Garry Castle rear lights but only one brake servo! (there’s always one!) But I think there still might be something in it. I’ve also noticed that cars which went to Gerry Castle appear to have been fitted with different seat belts which may reinforce the idea that he did more than just swap the light clusters. Again, I need to investigate this further across all the RHD cars but I think we may see some patterns emerging in all of this once the full and proper info has been gathered.
Incidentally, if there’s anyone out there in cyberspace reading this who used to work for Wooler-Hodec, I’d love to hear from you!
By the way Mart, here’s a photo of VIN# 5565 I took back in 2003 / 2004. Did the car still have the original clutch reservoir in place too?