Driving the car sedately the other night and I noticed the temperature rising more than usual. The coolant level had dropped but there were no signs of leaks anywhere, nothing on the garage floor. Topped it up and took it out and the level slowly dropped again? I removed the front inspection panels and the rad had a slightly damp patch at one side, no visible flow of coolant, but when it was up to temperature I could see it slightly steaming from where the tubes join the end header. Bugger, pretty pants for a 5 year old car with only 18,000km and especially as its an OEM all alloy rad and not a plastic rad in this car.
There aren’t too many Lotus dealers around this part of the world so it was time to get grubby. I don’t plan on doing the job twice so I ordered a Pro Alloy rad from Elise shop in Holland on Thursday figuring that it would get here in time for the weekend. I figured wrong, apparently UPS Express is 24hr in Europe…unless you live in Eastern Europe then its delivered by an arthritic donkey! Frustratingly I tracked the delivery online and it arrived in Bratislava at 8am Friday but won’t make the 4 hour trip to Kosice until Monday afternoon 
Fortunately the family are back in the UK visiting relatives so I had the weekend free to strip the car down. Its especially fortunate my good lady is away as the front clam is now in the bedroom 
well I don’t want it getting scratched in the garage.
When I read the workshop manual I nearly cried when it told me I had to remove the aircon system and both front oil coolers! It’s not the first time I’ve done a rad but last time was on Kermit the race car which was a full teardown, the aircon went in the skip and I fitted new oil lines - more importantly I was in the UK in a garage with tools. Thankfully a trawl through this wonderful website revealed some handy hints from Mr Shorrocks about how to extract the rad without removing the entire front of the car (many thanks John). Without this help I’d be well stuffed.
With the clam off and the rad surround freed up I took the advice of cutting two access holes in the rad surround for the front rad to aircon chiller bolts. Only problem was that the hole cutter I bought this morning had an 11mm hex that wouldn’t fit in my drill, *ollocks 
. So I sat down and had a cup of tea ,wondering how the hell to ask the neighbours in Slovak if they have a drill with a big chuck! Doh, then I figured out that I could put an 11mm socket on the hole cutter and hand cut the hole, it worked perfect and gave me direct access to the last two mission impossible screws. God knows why lotus didn’t put access holes there, there’s an identical one next to my new hole for accessing the hose clip.
Anyway the rads out, just got to wait for the new one to arrive tomorrow. While I’m at it I’ve ordered a stainless tow post as the current one looks like the anchor from the Titanic on a car thats spent its life in Dubai or a heated garage in Europe. Hopefully I will get time to put it all back together this week but if not Pierre has kindly offered to come over from Budapest and help me at the weekend, top chap 
Found something useful to keep the hoses clean and stop the coolant spilling… can’t think of any other uses for it!
