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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
With all the suspension components out of the way for the suspension refresh I took the opportunity to clean everything I could get to. A few years worth of grime had built up. Cleaner, warm water and various cleaning tools. After some wiping and rinsing, being careful to clean gently as I didn’t want to […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The last parts to strip down were the wishbones. They all had some surface rust, as seems to be the norm for all Elise’s, so I wanted to clean them down and give them a good coating of POR15. I had also ordered spherical bearings to replace the rubber bushes and new ball joints for all […]
As soon as I got the Elise I got it up on the lift for a good look over and found a few little jobs that needed doing including replacing some suspension parts like a ball joint and track rod ends at the front and a couple of toe link rod ends at the rear, […]
Having dealt with all the jobs on my first list it was time to get this lot put away and get the car out on the road! It was still very much winter so nice dry roads were few and far between but we did get a nice clear dry couple of days including a […]