After a few days wait my mate Steve turned up with a box for me. 🙂 I’m really happy with the colour, it ties in nicely with the original red seats in the car and means they will stand out a little under the car. Though nobody else is likely to ever see them I […]
Suspension Refresh
S1 Elise – Suspension Refresh – Aluminium Hub Carriers Cleaning and Anodising
When the Lotus designers decided to build the Elise using extruded aluminium they really ran with the idea and used it for more than just the chassis. The suspension uprights or hub carriers are one such example as extruded aluminium hub carriers was and still is out of the ordinary. My guess is that nowadays, […]
S1 Elise – Suspension Refresh – Nitron Shocks Freshen Up
The Nitron Street Series, fitted to my Elise by a previous owner, are very well liked by Lotus owners for road use and they certainly feel pretty good to me. So as I only intend to use the Elise on the road and the dampers had only covered 11k miles I didn’t see any reason […]
S1 Elise – Inspection for any Chassis Corrosion and Painting Steel Inserts
Corrosion of the Elise/Exige/VX220/Evora chassis is a thing and it’s something that I think should not be ignored by anyone looking to buy one of these cars. Also anyone who owns one that’s done a fair bit of winter road miles or is just a good few years old now should consider inspecting their chassis […]
Lotus Elise Chassis Damage and Corrosion, What to Look for
There’s plenty of helpful information out there on various websites and forums when it comes to buying guidance. But when I was looking before buying, it seemed one particular point didn’t really come up that often. Maybe it’s my experience with Classic Mini’s and old Japanese cars that means I can’t shake this particular concern? […]
S1 Elise – Suspension Refresh – A Few Other Parts Get The POR15 Treatment
The POR15 treatment went pretty well on the wishbones and various other parts of the running gear so I thought I’d go over a few other parts on the car. Firstly, I should have removed these lower rear wishbone brackets and put them through the whole process with all the other parts I’d removed. No […]
S1 Elise – Suspension Refresh – Wishbones etc POR15 Rust Preventive Paint
With all the preparation done. Finally it’s time to actually get some paint on these parts. Obviously the wishbones are a bit of an awkward thing to paint so I attached a bit of fishing line to each of them so I could hang them while painting and to dry. This was a great idea […]
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 etc POR15 Cleaner Degreaser
As I said in my previous post I decided on using POR15 on the wishbones and other steel parts. The main reason I chose it was that I could do it all myself. I am also not a fan of powder coating which is one of the other common options. In my experience with powder […]
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 […]