Craig's Lotus Elise Blog
A lot of Lotus type ramblings from an Elise owner.
Clean up under the Elise front clam shell and fitting a new air intake pipe
Blog Entry Saturday 29th August 2009
Last weekend I decided that the bleed valve I started on wasn't going to budge and would require a week of soaking in some penetrating oil, so I turned to cleaning. I took off the front wheels and gave them a brush down with some water to start with which surprisingly got rid of most of the brown brake pad dust. There was still a saturn style ring of dust stained on the inside of the wheel and so I took to some Autogylm Aluminium Wheel Cleaner which always does a good job. The wheels have come up really nice and it's a shame that they will eventually get all dusted up again. It might be worth me changing to another pad at some point. There are still a couple of nasty scratches on the front of one of the wheels where one Lotus Dealer in the southwest decided to remove my wheel weights with a screw driver a few years ago. I'll be restoring these scratches at some point when I get some silver paint and lacquer. Unless of course that dealer would like to offer to repair them for me? It's been a while so I wouldn't have thought so.
I also rubbed back the small plinth where the bonnet switch sits which though not showing rust was looking a little patchy. I resprayed it along with cleaning out everything under the front clam shell. I tightened the last of the bolts for the new driving light brackets now the bond has set on the pulserts.
Today I tried the bleed valve again with a socket this time rather than a ring spanner but it still doesn't want to move, so that has been put aside today and I'll be trying some suggestions from some of the guys on SELOC tomorrow.
So today I turned to the rear of the car and fitted a new pipe to run from the air intake on the side of the Elise to the air filter. The original one came out a few years ago. It was falling apart and just uncoiled when it was removed. I replaced it with some foil automotive pipe which was all I could get at the time but this was frankly rubbish. It's very fragile when fitting and refuses to go around corners easily. It also hates sitting on the air filter and tended to rattle against the steel sub-frame when you're driving. This time I found some excellent pipe work from Merlin Motorsport based at Castle Comb Race Circuit. I'd ordered it a couple of weeks ago on a Sunday and it was delivered the very next day. Today I pulled out the rear wheel arch liner, fitted the new pipe to the holder at the entrance of the air intake and secured in place with two large cable ties. I ran the pipe upwards into the hallow quarter section where the subframe travels up to the rollbar. I then brought it back down straight onto the air filter, so it no longer runs directly next to the hot coolant header tank and out of the engine bay as much as possible. I don't think this will make the slightest difference but at least the new pipe runs right to the air intake rather than the short foil pipe that was taking hot air from the engine bay.
I also removed a jubilee clip that was stuck on the radiator hose. The screw top had twisted and you could no longer undo it with a screw driver. To remove it I simple hammered a smaller sized 6mm socket on the end and then just undid the clip. It came off very easy and a new one was fitted. Now the new clip was fitted it was time to check both the clips were tight enough to avoid leaks, and to ensure the new radiator fan, fitted earlier, is actually working before putting everything back together. I started the car and brought it up to temperature. There was a small amount of steam coming from the other side of the radiator so that would need to be tightened but the new one was fine. After quite a while the coolant reached near boiling point and the glorious sound of the fan came flooding out. Huge amounts of hot air waffted up from the radiator which was all great news.
Another bit of work I did today was to rub back the anti-roll bar which had lost pretty much all it's black paint work from years of rain and stone chippings. I started with a rough guage wirewool to take off the worst and then went for wet and dry as preparation. Finally once dried and wiped with a cloth I sprayed it with Hammerite. I don't find Hammerite that great for lastibility so I'll be looking to give it a good few layers and possibly look at the options for some kind of hardening coat if I can find something.
Braided Hoses and a Brake Caliper
Blog Entry Saturday 22nd August 2009
Last weekend I had a look around the front of the car while the clam shell was off to see if there were any other jobs that needed doing. The anti-roll bar needs rubbing back and protecting but that was something I was already aware of. I thought about the brake hoses which will be ten years old along with the rest of the car in September, and although the rubber 'looks' ok, I decided they should be changed, especially as the brake fluid is due for renewal. I purchased a set of braided hoses for the Elise this week and started spraying some of the nuts involved with some penetrating fluid. I've read of a few people having items break off and the one thing I want to avoid is breaking the bleed nipple off in the caliper.
There wasn't much I could do last night as I still need to buy an Ezi-bleed kit and some brake fluid along with some other replacement items for under the front clam such as a few hex headed bolts but I did sit down and started cleaning up one of the calipers. I started with a gentle clean up with some wet and dry but not too much, just enough to take back a layer of brake dust from the Mintex brake pads I'm currently running. I then gave them a short soak in some Alloy Cleaner and brushed and washed it down, finally wiping clean with a cloth. The alloy is starting to clear up and the brake dust is coming off slowly. I'll work on this again at some point until the caliper is shining it's frosted look again.
Geometry, Radiator Fan and a Clam Shell
Blog Entry Sunday 16th August 2009
It's been a long while since my last entry. Many other things took priority over the car since March. So to catch up since the last post, the rack went back in to the Elise with new TRE's. The car drove quite well but needed the tracking setting up. My nearest Lotus dealer were asking £90 just to set up the tracking on the front and National Tyres wanted circa £25 according to head office's e-mail and £35 when I called the local branch?
After some research on my options I decided to learn how to set up geometry myself, bought some parts from my local DIY store and constructed my own equipment with help of some plans from the web. It took around two hours to get the front wheels aligned to my satisfaction and the results were incredible. The car felt like it did when it was new; tight on corners and confident. After being satisfied that it was good enough we took a trip to Donnington for the Club Lotus Show and found the car was handling very well. Since then though I have been doing lots of other jobs on the car and so will be returning to geometry set up at some other point as I would like to next look at doing all four wheels and check the camber rather than just the toe. More on that when I get to it.
The last few weeks I took the car off the road and decided to do as many jobs as I could to bring the car back up to scratch. I've so far identified twenty two things to do, but around seven are essential and at least two are urgent.
A few weeks ago I was in Bristol heading up to the triangle in Clifton when I got stuck in traffic. I noticed the temperature gauge was showing around 103 and I was getting no noise from the radiator fan that had, over the last 6 months, developed a loud grating noise. 'Lotus' panic obviously set in so I pulled up the first side street I could find. With the odd on-looker passing by I checked a few fuses but nothing had gone. There was no 'mayo' in the oil so happy it wasn't head gasket failure; always worth checking, especially after the first one. I was pretty certain the fan was dead and so let the engine cool and parked up for the day. The motorway trip home was fine. I later tried spinning the fan with a screw driver from through the front grill and it would barely turn, crunching as it did. The motor had seized and corroded up.
Also, for quite a long while the fuel pump has been whining and it has been getting progressively louder so this has been a bit of a Russian Roulette driving and waiting to see if it gives up, and so hence taking the car off the road until its done.
So, yesterday the front clam came off with help again from my good mate Mark. All bolts came out fairly easily except for one of the bolts that sits behind the door hinge in that really narrow gap. The end of my dremel is jammed so once the head on that wore down I was back to my drill with a grinding head to get the bolt out. This was better, though much slower as there were no sparks hitting the bodywork inside. Once the clam shell was loose and all the wiring unplugged, we pulled it forwards onto plenty of towels to reveal the crash structure and radiator.
The radiator shroud was a mixed bag of bolts, some came out easy, some were rusted and had to be grinded down, impatiently I knocked the head off some with a screw driver and a hammer, or Universal Adjuster as Mark calls it. There was also a Jubilee clip on the inlet hose on the side of the radiator that had rusted and the head just fell apart when trying to undo it, so that will have to be removed and changed soon. We eventually got enough access to lift the radiator and undo the fan. This is a careful job as you need to get a spanner between the radiator and the top of the bolt while you undo the locking nut. They did come out though after soaking with a little WD40. These nuts will have to be replaced along with many. The new fan is in and so we finished at that point until I get the new nuts.
In the weeks leading up to the clam coming off, I also removed the old driving lamp brackets. These were in terrible condition, one came out in three pieces because it had rusted right the way through. I had put new powder coated brackets from Elise Parts on through the grill opening but there was only so much I could do. The two lower pulserts (little grommets that sit in the crash structure that the bracket screws into), two needed drilling out and replacing which could only be done with the clam off. Yesterday the old ones were removed and new ones bonded in. They should be pretty much set now and so I'll finish screwing the driving lamps back in place. Bizarrely the old adjuster screws, despite being nylon had jammed in the old bracket and so these were drilled out also and replaced with nice new ones.
Along with the driving lamp brackets I also bought the powder coated head lamp brackets and so these will be done at some point while the clam is off, though it can be done with the arch liner out if need be. While the front clam is off I'll do all the jobs I can find before it goes back on and clean the whole area up while I'm at it. The pipe that directs air to the cabin had also split so I replaced this about two weeks ago. Once the front of the car is finished then I'll be looking at starting to get the fuel tank out and replacing the fuel pump. I'll also replace the air intake pipe that goes to the air filter. I'd previous done this using foil pipe but I found it rattled against things in the engine bay and wouldn't go around corners well. I have now purchased some good quality pipe work from Merlin Motorsport who are based at Castle Combe Race Circuit.
The Rack is Back..
Blog Entry Saturday 29th March 2009
Titan Motorsport and Automotive Engineering sent my steering rack by courier on Thursday. In fact when I got to work on Friday morning, it was already waiting at my desk. I had to open it up and have a proper look. I took all the bubble wrap off, the pinion and track rods were capped for protection and the aluminum casing was completely clean. All the oil stains from the pinion bearing had been cleaned so much that the rack looked almost brand new.
Titan informed me on Thursday that the only thing needed replacing was a bearing, and also one of the rubber gators which I'd already mentioned. As I had a spare gator, I'd sent it off with the rack so they could fit it if they thought it needed doing. The cost of servicing the rack came to £50 excluding VAT. That was £35 for labour and the rest in parts. Postage back was just a little over £11, which is almost half what I paid the Post Office.
Saturday, there was the odd short shower of rain but that soon cleared up. Mark came over to give me a had with putting the rack back in but before tackling that we had to look at the track rod ends. I bought a new pair but I still couldn't get the old ones off due to the nut sticking on the rusty end of the bolt. It had us stumped for quite a while. Mark is a big fan of the brut force attack on some things and he gladly popped back to his house for a blow torch. He heated the locking nut of the old track rod end until the nylon lock melted, dripping in flames to the driveway. We gave the nut a turn and it came off without the ball joint spinning in the socket. We gave the same treatment to the drivers side track rod end which had two nuts and a nylon washer which didn't last long in the blue flame.
I was stumped again though when trying to do up the new locking nut on the new track rod end. I couldn't figure any way of using the ball joint splitter to act as a press. I searched the net but couldn't find any suggestions until, as usual, one of the simplest solutions provided the answer. Seat the TRE (Track Rod End) in the hole of the steering arm. Get a rubber mallet, or in my case a lot of thick foam and a regular metal hammer and carefully knock the TRE into place. This gave enough grip on the ball joint thread and the locking nut went straight on.
The rack went in after cleaning out a little dirt and dust from the steering rack channel. Lining up with the four retaining bolts was quite easy and painless with Mark holding the rack in place. I checked the Lotus Elise workshop manual for torque settings when I realised we'd need some thread lock. This meant another trip to Halfords. Back in the foot well of the car, some thread lock on the bolts and we torqued up the four bolts, the two lower ones and two upper bolts with different torque values. Finally from the inside, I pushed the rubber grommet in place over the pinion which went in fairly easy with a bit of lithium based grease in the centre to stop any squeaking; something I remember White Dove, the Lotus dealer back in 1999 when I purchased the car forgetting to do when I had a faulty rack replaced under Lotus warranty, along with not centering the steering wheel!
With the TREs now on the rack and the steering arms, we adjusted the tracking. At first I set this to the same thread count as it was before, to at least get the car drivable. I didn't think this would line up though as the new TREs from Elise Parts are slightly shorter and a different manufacturer to the original Lotus items. The wheels certainly didn't line up at all. The wheels were toe-out, massively. If I'd driven the car down the road, I think it would have split in two, the passenger heading down into the estate and the driver off to the shops. We threaded the track rods several times and set them to equal thread counts until the toe-out was almost visibly straight but still way out. My choice now is to either learn an accurate toe set-up method, and/or take it to a workshop to be done on a machine. It would be interesting to do both to see how close I can get it.
We called it a day when I had some trouble getting the UJ back onto the pinion. It looked like I'd need to undo the upper pinion and move the mid section of the steering column up to pop it on, but I was too tired to go upside down in the foot well on Saturday and so left it until today.
More about today later.
Steering Wait and Tyre Weld
Blog Entry Tuesday 24th March 2009
Not much has happened with the Elise this week. The steering rack was sent off to Titan Motorsport over in Cambridge at a cost from the friendly Post Office of £20 and is currently being dismantled to be examined. Last week the new track rod ends arrived from Elise Parts and a new rubber grommet arrived by special order from the factory via Bell and Colvill; pretty much a wet-finger in the air selection of dealer.
Last Sunday I decided to jump start the car as the battery had fallen flat from being on the drive for a while but ended up blowing the alarm fuse somehow. So during a quick trip to Halfords I picked up a couple of spare fuses and some grease for the grommet around the pinion when that goes in. I popped into one of the big-four supermarkets and spotted and excellent deal on some Holts Tyre Weld, basically a can of filler for a puncture, the spare wheel. The pack included the Tyre Weld Can, a florescent safety jacket, a metal Maglite-style torch and some latex gloves all in a nice bag.
I already had a luminous jacket but the can of Holts Tyre Weld in the car was the same one when I bought the Elise, so coming up to ten years old, so I thought it best to replace it. And why not. The whole package was under £5 and the back of the storage bag is lined with three Velcro strips which stick to the boot carpet wall nicely. There is plenty of room in the bag for any extras that you might like to add in case of a breakdown, especially with the can of Tyre Weld clipped under the front bonnet where it normally sits.
Just waiting for a call from Titan now.
Elise steering rack, simple..
Blog Entry Saturday 14th March 2009
It's been a strange week without the car. I've been without the Elise for much longer, when the head gasket was changed or that time I needed to remove the lambda sensor and just couldn't get it out. The reason it has felt so long is because on Wednesday morning I overslept. My alarm wasn't set, I woke with 10 minutes to shower, change and get out the door for the train station. Normally I would have jumped in the car and used that for late running.
Still, this morning is a bright sunny day and perfect to have another go at the steering rack. It was quite simple, I should have used the same logic with the pinion being stuck as I did with the Lambda sensor. With the sensor the solution was to just take the manifold out and then use a large spanner to undo the sensor. The manifold was very easy to remove and so was the sensor when it was out on the grass and my mate Mark was able to hold the manifold while I gave it the beans.
The steering rack was also simple. I followed a suggest on Seloc about the UJ pinch bolt holding the pinion in place. It certainly was. I took the bolt out completely, gave the rack a wiggle and the pinion slipped down a few millimeters without effort. I pushed the handle of a tapping hammer under the rack to push it back up towards the bulk head to take the weight. Back in the footwell I pulled the UJ up and it came straight off the pinion, again without effort. Waggled the rack a little and it came straight out. One note is that it wouldn't come out through the passenger side, this is probably due to the supposed unused rivnut blocking the rack. There is some discussion whether you should or shouldn't remove it, but there really is no need to. Just pull it out the drivers side. It came out even with the rubber grommet attached that sits around the pinion.
Now just to find enough bubble wrap and stamps to post the rack off to Cambridge! Until next time...
Elise steering rack pinion here to stay..
Blog Entry Sunday 8th March 2009
Continuing on from yesterday's steering rack removal on the Lotus Elise, today I had to try and pop the pinion out of the steering column universal joint between bursts of rain and more hail. Unfortunately no amount of waggling on the track rod would free it. In fact I gave the gap in the universal joint a bit of a whack with a hammer and flat bladed screw driver and tried giving the pinion a good tap from the top but still no luck. I decided to give it one last try by loosening off the next pinch bolt up on the UJ, which did allow it to move freely on that end of the steering column but still no movement on the pinion. I'm sure they've welded the thing together. I took one last look at the pinion and it's moved about half a millimeter. So the tools have been put away for another week. I suspect there may be a chance of some give if I completely remove the pinch bolt rather than it being loose but in place. Wish me luck!
Time to tighten up on steering..
Blog Entry Saturday 7th March 2009
I've had my Elise S1 for over nine years, and it still feels as fresh today as it did when I picked it up that sunny day at the dealer in Cardiff. I say still fresh because the engine still revs as freely, if not more and the performance is so gusty; I still can't find a reason to sell it, especially when it can still give fifty miles to the gallon when I need to and give that electrifying experience after over one hundred and seventeen thousand miles.
That all said, the steering has has a very minor play and a little too much bump steer which is probably down to a mixture of worn bushes and steering rack. So I decided to take the steering rack out and give you an update on the status. Last weekend I made a start by loosening the bolt on the UJ in the footwell at the bottom of the steering column, I also made an attempt at splitting the ball joint on the track rod end with a scissor type splitter but without luck. In the mean time, I decided to crack on with it this morning while the sun was out before this afternoon's rain which came in as expected at lunch time.
I decided to take the tracking rod out of the track rod end and work on that ball joint while the steering rack is away at the manufacturers being serviced. It was pretty painless unscrewing the track rod; I'd done not so long ago when I changed a split gaiter. I pinned the steering arm in place and put the wheel back on and changed the jack to the other side of the car and unscrewed the other track rod. It was at this point I found that the ball joint on that side worryingly has two nuts locked against each other with a washer, whereas the other side only had the one nut. Definitely something to investigate with urgency!
Next part was to undo the four main bolts that keep the rack in place. So head first in the foot well I find the bolts are too stiff just using a socket and wrench which was expected. I phoned my mate Mark as I only have one extension. He kindly brought over some half inch extensions, a quarter converter and we cobbled together about three or four extension bars which brought the massive torque wrench out of the foot well to give me lots of leverage. They came out with no problem at all.
So now the rack is loose and ready to be pulled off the pinion and hopefully slide out without too much problem. The rain started at that point so the roof went back on and the tools packed away for the afternoon. Lets hope the weather changes tomorrow. I certainly had plenty of exercise at 9am when I had to use the mountain bike for the 3 mile round trip to Halfords for a 19mm spanner for the track rod lock off nut.
Until next time..