[DML] Re: National Geographic April 1981

["content22207" <brobertson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

My thoughts on this matter really center around the spare tire well.

It's hard to believe that an underbody was carefully laid out as close
to one piece as possible (quite a feat that even Lotus hadn't
accomplished yet), yet no one took into consideration hauling home a
flat rear tire! Every curve and lip on those molds was carefully
mapped out. Not only that, but there were multiple molds -- multiple
chances to get it right. You would think that somewhere along the line
somebody would eventually have noticed the oversight. Goodness knows
it was one of the very first things I noticed after buying my car.

But as you point out, nobody bothered to design the entire interior
from the seats back (and don't forget that they were driving pilot
cars around the factory with Vise Grips because nobody had bothered
with a steering wheel). Perhaps an unnecessarily undersized spare well
isn't such a big deal after all.

Until you have a flat in the rear....

Bill Robertson
#5939


>--- In dmcnews@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "Louie" <louie@...> wrote:
>
> I did some more digging around on this car when I got home last night. 
> This was indeed the car that Lotus developed at their Hethel plant. It 
> was essentially their hand fabricated first try at converting the 
> DeLorean from the ERM concept car to a Lotus backbone frame, etc. 
> Every picture you see of this car it has plexiglass solid windows, 
> very primative fiberglass doors, the interior was basically a shell 
> with a random seat thrown in, etc. There is a lot of talk in Stainless 
> Steel Illusion about their trials and errors with most notably the 
> rear suspension setup on this car, but wheel size is never mention. I 
> think the picture Tiffany posted is somewhat misleading. I don't think 
> the rear tires are actually 14 inches, it could be the slight angle 
> the picture was taken. Every picture I found of this car in Stainless 
> Steel Illusion and the DeLorean Gold Portfolio show that the rear rims 
> are clearly larger than the front ones. 
> 
> But the interesting thing is this: all the pictures I saw showed the 
> car with different FRONT wheels than this picture. They were totally 
> unmatching. So it's possible Lotus was experimenting with larger FRONT 
> wheel sizes. Or even more likely, they simply slapped them on the car 
> for some reason or another that day (maybe a wheel got banged up at a 
> track run one day or something, or maybe they wanted the wheels to 
> semi-match for this photo shoot). I just wouldn't put too much stock 
> at all into what you see on this car vs the production automobile. 
> Keep in mind what George Crane said at DCS Pigeon Forge about the way 
> the DeLorean was engineered and timeframes and such. Remember he said 
> he had 45 minutes to design the pedal box, and had to design the total 
> parcel shelf in 2 hours after realizing one day that nobody had? 
> Everything was done so haphazard, with crazy time constraints, and no 
> money.
> 
> I need to bring you all my goodies to Farrar's get together to show 
> you (speaking of, when is Farrar's pow wow?). I think you'd be very 
> interested by Stainless Steel Illusion and the Pennebaker & Hedgus 
> Documentary that documents the development of the DeLorean from about 
> 1979 to mid 1981. The 'professional nature' of some of the board 
> meetings captured is classic lol.
> 
> Louie Golden
> Charlotte, NC
> 



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