I have just finished rebuilding the rear calipers on my baby Elan. I have to say that this was the most painful / difficult job I have done so far on the Elan including a top end rebuild on the engine.
Getting the unit stripped, freeing off the seized joints with gas torch and hammer
Pulling out the old pistons
Stripping off the baked on dust, crap and rust
Fitting the new seals and dust covers
It all took an age and was fiddly in the extreme.
Go on, share your pain here and vote for your job with the most ball ache
The most difficult job is not on an Elan at all, try replacing a water pump on an Esprit with the engine in the car or doing anything at all on the engine of a turbo Esprit !
But if forced to go back to Elan problems I would vote for
Replacing donuts until you learn how to do it properly,
Rebuilding an engine once you learn how to do it properly
replacing the waterpump bearings with the engine still in the car (then, after you have rebuilt the engine, realising youâve set the wrong gap between the impeller and the casing , and doing it all over again. )
removing the entire handbrake mechanism (especially the tree), cleaning and refitting with new h/brake cable with the body still on.
Funnily enough I didnât find the rear calipers all that troublesome. I connected an old footpump to the open bleed nipple and blew the pistons out.
Next job I donât fancy is repairing the paintwork. Itâs covered in osmosis so will have to come off and be redone. Days of scraping - Boredom city!
Discovering that the water pump you so carefully rebuilt, leaks when everything is back together so you have to start all over again (or pay somebody else as I did)
or
Removing the rear wheel bearings after reading the short section in the factory manual which suggest you can to it at home quite easily!! I think it says something like 'knock out the old bearings" - I had to use a vertical hydraulic 5 ton press.
or
Fitting the two rear lower thackery washers holding the rear Weber carb on.
Removing the rotoflexes when ALL 12 bolts are have welded themselves into the sleeves of the rotoflexes. Stopped short of setting fire to them!
Now have sliding splines
Cheers
Tim
i have had to do all the mentioned in the restoration of 26R â S2 â 33 but the worst job was creating the wiring harness-----3 grueling months of yoga positions ----electrical fires and burned fingers ed law <_< ------
But the best, the restoration of a 62 Elite I purchased in boxes, installed engine and tranmission together, then the diff etc., only to find out the prop shaft will not go in with both in place, out comes the diff again!
sounds like you fell for the same story I did-----oh yes its all there --in these boxes ----just screw it together -----the car is worth it though --closer to getting on the road ---- :unsure: btw the cut out hole on the passenger side is a big help in installing the drive shaft without removing the diff -ed law
I agree with Rohan, my vote is for the donuts UNTILL youâve done it a couple of times, followed by the water pump (head on) I take my hat of to you guys who have done it without taking off the head but I still think I could do it in the same time (or less) WITH taking the head off! AND I wouldnât have oil leaks. :rolleyes:
Brian
Iâd have to agree that the rear calipers were a real faff. After 14 years sitting still, they were a real sod for every reason described here. But getting the old -pistons out was by far the worst. Blow them out? No chance with mine, I had my compressor give it about 150 psi and nothing! 14 years of rust has quite a grip! I got 3 out by hammering hard with a big screw driver around the lip of the piston. Took ages but worked, eventually. For the the fourth, I ended up drilling it through the few mm that poked out, inserting a bolt and twisting it. Still took a few hours, though
Removing the rotoflexes was a pain, but the worst part was getting covered in cr*p every time I whacked a bolt - years of caked on road crud seem to want to get into my eyes - even got around my safety specs.
Next time when air pressure fails to dislodge brake caliper pistonsâŚuse a geasegun, it will generate a lot more pressure! The hard part is trying to keep which ever piston wants to come out first in place so you can break the other one free as well. The greasegun will generate about the same pressure as the brakes would under normal use, I defy a stuck piston to resist!
Dave
lotus026
Water pump on my ex-Esprit with engine installed (yea, yea, not Elan). So Elan related, the donuts. I have no problem getting them installed, it is the removal that kills me.
[b]QUOTE[/b] (Hamish Coutts @ Mar 30 2005, 11:52 AM)
The most difficult/awkward jobs in my book are:
replacing the top diff mounts with body still on.
replacing the waterpump bearings with the engine still in the car (then, after you have rebuilt the engine, realising youâve set the wrong gap between the impeller and the casing , and doing it all over again. )
removing the entire handbrake mechanism (especially the tree), cleaning and refitting with new h/brake cable with the body still on.
Funnily enough I didnât find the rear calipers all that troublesome. I connected an old footpump to the open bleed nipple and blew the pistons out.
Next job I donât fancy is repairing the paintwork. Itâs covered in osmosis so will have to come off and be redone. Days of scraping - Boredom city!
Regards,
Hamish.
[/quote]
Most difficult job? Good griefâŚare any of them easy? I bought my first Elan in '74 and my current one, a 71 Sprint in '76. In the last 30 odd years I seem to have done most of the usual jobs more than once, mostly in the first 20 years when it was my work car and I ran up about 200,000 miles. Let me down once, so much for Lotus unreliability. Possibly the only job I have done only once is the water pump which failed very soon after I tightened, ( as in over-tightened ), the fan belt in a vain attempt to solve an undercharging generator problem. Until that time the water pump had never been even the slightest problem which leads me to suspect that an awful lot of fanbelts are running too tight chopping out a lot of pumps way before their time. I had about a 100,000 miles on it before I took it out in 500 miles by over-tightening it in frustration after yet another flat battery.This proved two things.It is possible to push-start an Elan on your own as long as the road is at least level,and, secondly, the final answer to Elan charging problems is to fit an alternator. Especially as the generator control boxes I got from my local Lucas agent were made in India and lasted about a year rather than the 15 the original had. Re taking paint offâŚonly done it once so certainly a million miles from being an expert but after a lot of reading and a fair amount of experimenting I settled on a method which wasnât too difficult. Put a piece of cloth about 30cm sq. on the body, soak in thinners. cover with plastic sheet and weights, (to prevent evaporation and leave for about 10-15 minutes.Then scrape!!
Best scraper is something that is not as hard as gelcoat.Acrylic sheet (perspex) worked OK. Trace out with a pencil all the spider cracks to get an idea of how big an area of cracked gelcoat needs to be removed. Draw a circle around the whole mess so you know what needs doing. Then remove gelcoat down to glass.I know this sounds a bit like the infamous âreverse processâ instruction in workshop manuals, but it isnât as difficult as it seems once you get going.I tried every recommended way in all the books without much success until I hit on using a belt sander. Not the flat part, unless you want a multi-faceted car, but the nose/roller part at the front. With not much practise you can skim a 1-2 mm layer off the body without loosing the contour. Glass with a layer of tissue then finish with filler, in my case Isopon (donât know if it is still available). There are almost certainly better and faster ways of doing this but I did mine in 1991 and I have yet to see even a single crack re-appear.Good luck!!!
One question. The thinners you mention to soak the cloth in, is this cellulose thinners? Pardon my ignorance but Iâm not all that knowlegeable on paint.
I have just had a look at the original thinners tin that I bought about 15 years ago to get the paint off my car.Now full of petrol for the mower!!! but original marking is âAcrylic Lacquer A type Thinnerâ. Why I decided that this was the correct thinner for the paint on the car I really donât recall but I think it was a case of experimentation i.e. suck it and see! The car had last been repainted in the UK in about 1974, so whatever was the norm at that time was what I took off. That it needed a repaint after a mere 3 years does raise a few questions about the quality of the original job. The repaint was also a very bad job and used so much spray filler that you could read the layers of paint in the same way a geologist reads strata of the Earth!
Since you inspired me to have a look at the paint on my elan, it seems that it has been resprayed as there is a line in the paint behind a lot of the pust on rubber trims. I have scraped off some of the paint on the base of the door (where there was overspray) and at least it is the same colour - letâs look on the positive side! Looks like someone has tried to cover up the osmosis on the cheap (I donât think the paint is all that great). The consequence is there is another layer of paint to remove.
Thanks for the advice, coming all the way from the land of Chris Amon (the best driver never to win a GP). Isnât the internet amazing.