While I had the Elise apart for the suspension refresh I was on the lookout for anything else that might need some attention. I had already noticed the dirt that had got behind the headlamp covers and that one side was letting water in so I was going to have to deal with that. What […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 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’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: […]
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, […]