The history is that I had had a bad run of aborted road trips caused by mechanical failures, so with the help (i.e. he did all the work) of a very kind SE friend I had an Audi engine fitted but I could never get it to run right - though it had worked after it had been installed, it developed a fault that I couldn't track down and in the end I ran out of patience. So I was chatting to Craig about what to do next.
I had a complete K series plus all sorts of go faster bits that could be made into a pretty good engine, especially as I already had the Emerald from the Audi conversion. But the reason I abandoned the K in the first place was the reliability of the whole package - that's not to say it cannot be made good but it would be time consuming and expensive to put this lot together in such a way as to be confidence inspiring. Of my previous 5 trips, 4 had been abandoned due to engine reliability (alternator regulator failure, starter motor pinion, alternator case failure, exhaust manifold failure). I couldn't really see how to prevent these things happening.
Then Craig mentioned that Andy was getting the Stark kit fitted to his Elise S1 (which used to be mine) and that they would be more than happy to fit another kit to my car. Ignoring the costs of the donor engine for a moment, the costs to build up my K and have it fitted in place of the Audi was not so different from the cost of the kit plus labour to fit the Stark kit. In part this is because some of the stuff you need to replace when you do the conversion I would need to replace to put the K back, so I was looking at spending that money either way.
So I spoke to Stark about the options on offer and concluded their basic kit plus a running type R would be the way to go - we were lucky that we picked up a clean, running, Type R for a song (we sold everything that was left post engine removal) - so I ordered the kit from Stark, it arrived on time, and voila:
Yet to do more than a handful of miles but it feels solid - the only rattles are the screws of my speaker cowlings and the engine lid - both of which already rattling back when the K was in it.
I still need to make the speedo & coolant temperature display work (because I removed the old ECU and Stark use that to drive this on S2 only - not relevant on S1). I've got a wee board that does it, but I want to make it a bit more robust before getting it plumbed in permanently.
Of course it was a substantial sum in total - but nothing like I thought it would cost and Egor rolls again, which is the most important thing!
Cheers,
Robin
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