I thought I’d take a few pictures of everything freshly reassembled after the suspension refresh, as a record of it’s condition, before I cover it all with ACF-50 and it ends up with a layer of brake dust and road grime over it. Now I can get the Elise back on it’s wheels! 🙂
elise wishbones
S1 Elise – Suspension Refresh – Assembling the Rear Suspension
With the front finished it’s time to start assembling rear suspension components back onto the Elise. Pretty much the same as the front with a few small differences. Starting with these chassis brackets for the lower wishbones. A bit of corrosion block grease applied too. Right hand lower wishbone on. Upper one on. Damper mount. […]
S1 Elise – Suspension Refresh – Fitting Front Hub Carriers, Camber Shims, Ball Joint Plinths, Steering Arms, Brakes, Disc Guards and Drop Links
Now the wishbones are on and the bolts all torqued up… …I moved on to assembling the rest of the front end. As usual with these things ‘refitting is the reverse of removal’. The ball joint plinths need fitting to the ball joints first. I used a bit of copper grease here to help prevent […]
S1 Elise – Suspension Refresh – Fitting Front Wishbones and Shims for Maximum Caster
Having read a little about Elise wheel alignment it sounds like the best thing to do is to get as much caster angle into the front hubs as possible. More caster angle means increased weight and ‘feel’ in the steering and should increase grip at the front when cornering. The available caster adjustment on an […]
S1 Elise – Suspension Refresh – Fitting New Ball Joints
If you happen to have arrived here looking for info on how to replace a ball joint with the wishbone still on the car then check out my other post here. Having fitted the Elise Parts wishbone bearing kit I could move on to pressing the new ball joints in but just before getting stuck […]
S1 Elise – Suspension Refresh – Fitting Elise Parts Wishbone Bearings
To be honest I couldn’t see or feel much wrong with the original rubber wishbone bushes, they didn’t have any excessive movement and hadn’t aged badly. But to properly prepare and paint the wishbones they had to be removed so some replacements were required. I had a good read about the various replacement options and […]
S1 Elise – Suspension Refresh – Wishbones etc POR15 Metal Prep
As I’ve shown in previous posts I’d removed any loose rust with various wire wheels and brushes and used the POR15 Cleaner Degreaser to thoroughly clean any grease and dirt off all surfaces. So the second stage of the process was to apply POR15 Metal Prep. This is what they say about their Metal Prep: […]
S1 Elise – Suspension Refresh – Wishbones Surface Rust Removal
With the wishbones now bare I could get on to examining them and preparing them for the full POR15 treatment (why I chose this coating over other options I will explain later). I was pretty confident the wishbones were not suffering from any serious corrosion as my Elise is at fairly low mileage of 53k […]