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As you can see, we offer noses in two sizes. The nose on the right is the TTL* which is a pretty common size for modern Locosts. Remember, when the Lotus 7 America came over here in 1960, it had a 948cc pushrod engine and 48 horses** under the hood. Nowadays most folks build these with double to triple the horsepower, thanks to modern powerplants.
Unfortunately, most of those modern powerplants are pretty dang tall compared with the engines of yore, which had small displacements, short strokes, and cams--I mean 'cam'--under the cylinders.
Then again, there are a few modern powerplants that are exceptions to that rule, and they can go with the nose on the left; the version we call the Catfish***.
The Catfish nose is four inches shorter than the TTL, and also three inches wider. If you're wondering why the heck we'd bother making such a thing, well, it's to accomodate wider and lower powerplants than the traditional four-in-line. Such as the Hirth triple, various Subarus, Ski-Doo and other snowmobiles, Jet Skis...plus a 45" wide chassis (the standard Locost design is for a 42" chassis) is as wide as you can go with 1st Generation Miata suspension components (but that's a project for '07).
Both noses are $199, which reflects some cost increases since our doors opened. Resin prices have gone up like every other material made out of petroleum, and glass prices have gone up like every other material made out of energy, but we've been able to keep our FRP parts relatively low cost (to coin a phrase) because:
A) Newer/better molds mean we don't have to repair seamlines and such.
...and...
B) We don't do the edge finishing
Yep, we trim the edges when the plastic gels, pop the part out of the mold, and put it in a box, and you sand the edges once you've trimmed the nose to fit your particular chassis and engine and radiator. You can customize the fit--which you may want to do to in small ways to fine tune your look, or in big ways if your car departs in big ways from the book.
For example, imagine you're building Locost with the McSorley 7+442 frame mods, and a Toyota 4age engine. You may not need that full extra inch of hood clearence, so you can push the nose back a bit (which lowers it slightly, as you cut back the bottom edge), and you need to raise the edge 2" to fit the taller frame, so you can trim the TTL nose as shown (via Photoshop) below.
...or perhaps you want to tilt the nose forward a couple degrees so you can fit a slightly bigger engine in a "book" chassis & or perhaps you find the front of the high frame is a bit abrupt for you aesthetically...hey, it's your car, you can change it as you like.
STOP THE PRESSES This just in (though it's been on LocostUSA.com since November of 2006): chetcpo measured a TTL nose and photoshopped the dimensions onto these pix. This may be helpful if you're figuring what motors will fit.
*Taller Than Lotus -- it's 1" taller than a Lotus 7 Series 2.
**Yeah, but they had steaming flanks. And thundering hooves, too.
***Pronounced KATE-fish, of course. We're tempted to spell it "Catphish" and pronounce it KATE-pish, but that might be gilding the lily.
