Crikey, no elan owner wants to experience this kind of thing. What you
need to do before you fix the problem is to ascertain what caused the
failure in the first place, once you know that you can move forward
with confidence.
As to carrying out a repair to the rear tray & brackets…I’m afraid
It?s a body off the chassis job, doing repairs with the body and
everything else still attached is a pain, the results are often less than
satisfactory & ending up with a job that’s only half done, sorry, I
don?t mean to be critical, but that’s the way it is with these fragile
little lotus cars.
I have retrieved some old photos that I took waaay back in 1982 during
the rebuild of my elan S2, The chassis was in a pretty bad way, but with
a lot re-fabricating and new sheet metal added the chassis is still in
service today.
Image no 1: Shows a rear wishbone in the early stages of fabrication,
being built on a simple jig that I made. Surprisingly when the elan
was put on the laser wheel aligner the rear setting was only out a fraction,
which required a small adjustment. With the current elan s2 rebuild
happening right now, I am installing threaded adjusters (left hand - right hand)
in the rear straight wishbone tubes so that minor adjustment tweaks can be
made if the wishbones are not quite right. I like to have the ability
to adjust the suspension - both front & rear.
Image 2: New wishbone mounting brackets being aligned and tack welded
to the new rear tray, yes, the rear lower part of the chassis was virtually
replaced. The new brackets were upgraded to 14g metal, the original
brackets are far too weak in my opinion.
Image 3: Another shot of the rear tray fabrication work. You might like to
know that over the past twenty odd years the chassis has not developed
any further cracks, or parts that have parted company with the chassis. If
you are skilled at welding and metal fabricating methods, you will be
surprised at how a damaged chassis can be rebuilt back to top condition
again.
A word on welding galvanised sheet metal. You cannot weld on raw galvanised
metal, every trace of the gal has to be removed by grinding with a flap
wheel mounted on a small angle grinder, old brackets will need to be removed
to thoroughly clean the metal. If Welding is done on galvanised metal
the gal will react & burn with the welding heat and create a crystal like
structure in the metal which will only lead to further cracking and fatigue
and probable future failure.
And that is another reason why I would never own a galvanised chassis, I
much prefer a paint primed chassis finished with three or four top coats of
black chassis enamel, at least that can be removed with stripper of sand
blasting before major welding repairs are done. Understand in Australia we
don?t have salt spread on the roads, so corrosion is not the big problem you
may have in the Northern part of the globe.
Anyway I hope the above info has been of some help.
Col
elantrikbits.com
Australia