Esprit

21 Jul '08 Got to the bottom of the engine clatter today! Apparently there was a heat-shield that may or may not have been vibrating against the exhaust manifold at certain revs from resonance. Given that we had to bend a few things to get to the alternator when we rebuilt it, and the knocking started immediately after that, it's very very plausible that this could be the cause of the noise. Still, I wouldn't mind inspecting the inside of the engine, perhaps replacing things like the valve-guides, main and big end bearings. Will take some advice from the UK K-series gurus though and see whether this is worth doing or whether I'm best leaving it all alone (if it ain't broke....)

20 Jul '08 What followed next was a couple of hours of cleaning up with the wire brush, the brass brush, the emery and the polish in the lathe. They're not 100% complete here but it shows a bit of an improvement. The outboard CV is mostly cleaned here with just some fiddly hand-work to do with the emery between the trigger wheel teeth. The Inboard CV cleaned up really nice and required minimal work, while the driveshaft took a little more work but came up well. Due to the heaviness of the corrosion on some of the bits there's still some evidence of some pitting, but this doesn't bother me too much, they don't need to be prefect, I just don't want them to look like they've been sitting on the bottom of the ocean for 10 years! This week I'm going to track myself down the POR15 supplier in Auckland and get some of their kits. They do a clear coat now I believe, so this will be used on the outside of the CV joints and hubs to keep them looking reasonable after being exposed to the weather. The driveshaft will be painted gloss black along the centre (left uncoated at the ends where the boots fit over as that's grease-filled and needs no protection). Next weekend I aim to finish off polishing the uprights I started last weekend (may look at getting these anodised after some recommendations from the SELOC guys... will take them to the anodisers this week to enquire (won't bother if they're not going to come up really nice) and I will do the same as what I've done today with the offside driveshaft and CV joints. Now that I've done one side, the second should be very easy. I also hope to FINALLY get my lot of suspension off for sandblasting and to chase up my STILL undiagnosed engine.... still, if I get all that done, as well as procure my POR 15, by the end of next weekend I should be well on the way!

20 Jul '08 Today's job was to begin stripping and refurbishing the Driveshafts and CV joints. These, like the hubs, were heavily corroded thanks to being unprotected and exposed to salt splash. I decided to only do one side at a time so that I've got less parts sitting around in bits to lose/mess up. I started off with the Nearside driveshaft assembly, it looked like this.... rather scungy. I ditched the boots (new ones on the way from the UK) and split the joints from the shaft. Took about 2 hours to get both the CV joint end and the tripod joint end all degreased and meticulously cleaned and inspected for wear. They look good with minimal signs of wear so they're worth refurbishing rather than getting completely new ones. Next task was to mask them up with duct tape so prevent the ingress of dust/grit and also to protect the engagement splines. Pics show the Outboard and inboard joints respectively before they were cleaned up. Corrosion is worse on the outboard end because it's more exposed. Note the trigger wheel for the ECU speed sensor... corrosion on this was causing some ECU faults, so carefully cleaning this up would be a priority. Pic also shows the bare driveshaft.

13 Jul '08 This weekend's efforts have involved doing the remaining two hubs, which have come up okay as well as pulling a few more bits off the car and masking for sandblasting. Hope to get this all off for blasting/plating this week! Smiley I've started on the cleanup of the front uprights too, have one cleaned now and am halfway through the other... the pics show comparison between the two. Once they're both cleaned, they'll be buffed up with some autosol to protect them then probably finished off with a good coating of ACF50 protectant to keep them free from corrosion.

09 Jul '08 Well it's been VERY slow progress lately... working 100 hour weeks hasn't helped, but hopefully as winter really sets in I'll be making some good progress. The engine is being stripped, currently have no indication of what the noise was though... hope to find this out in the next day or two. All the suspension is now off the car and awaiting cleaning up and repainting. All the hubs etc are all split and the old bushes and balljoints have been binned. Here you can see the wishbones as they've been removed from the car. I plan to have these bead-blasted and re-plated/passivated to the same finish they had when new. I'm intending to get the platers to do a debrittle treatment on them too as I've heard the welds can crack if this is not done... pays to be on the safe side I guess. Here are the upper shock mounts (rear). They're not too bad, but the plating (looks like hot-dip galvanising or electrogalv) has seen better days. I'll probably leave the front ones as they look okay, but the rears will be replated all shiny and new. I'd love to replate the rear subframe as well as the galv has blackened here, but still appears to be intact. due to the hassle involved with removing and re-galving it, I'll probably not bother. It's not exposed to the elements and the galv still seems to be doing its job. Pretty much ready to send the lot of stuff out for blasting/plating. There may be a second batch of odds and ends, but this will cover off 95% of the stuff I think. I've also had a go at cleaning up the hubs. They weren't too bad, but have seen better days. It looks like they were just plain, unprotected cast iron and as the photos show they've cleaned up not bad (see before/after). Some pitting is still evident, but that doesn't bother me too much. I'll probably give these a degrease and mask them up and give them a spray-lacquer (clear) on the exposed surfaces... should keep them in good enough nick for the next dozen years or so. Will do the other two hubs this weekend and will start to clean up the ali uprights also. Will get the blasting/plating sent off during the week, so hopefully that will progress pretty quickly. I'll then be on to cleaning up various bits on the tub/engine bay and onto cleaning up the driveshafts/CVs as I reckon we can make these a bit prettier before giving these a coat of something to keep them looking semi-okay. That should keep me busy for a few weekends and hopefully by then I'll know more about the state of the engine and can plan the reassembly

02 Jun '08 MOAR PICS!!!!! Suspension's all off now Was a bit of a nightmare getting some of the more corroded bits apart but the good news is that there's nothing that'll not clean up as good as new once I've thrown some money and elbow grease at it I was actually surprised how good it is. Most of the "rust" has turned out to be caked on brake dust. One of the wishbones has a little flaking on it, but this is very minor and should media-blast up to virgin metal pretty easily and will look like new when re-plated. The chassis has stood up impeccably. It REALLY needs a clean and it'll get a bit of a light buff with AutoSol in places and maybe an undercoating of ACF50 to keep it from any further damage but once it's back together and in a salt-free NZ climate (and under my careful ownership), it should look as good in 20 years time as it does when I'm done

01 Jun '08 Little progress to be seen in May really... much of May was taken at Lotus getting the engine out. Got the back brakes off yesterday, will get all the suspension and brakes off today then should be able to start separating hubs and balljoints etc. Not looking too pretty at the moment

20 Apr '08 Well I'm embarking on a winter rebuild for the Exige to freshen it up, and basically return it to as-new condition under the skin. Lotuses don't tend to age in the dry, salt-free environment of NZ so I want to get it right so it'll be many many years before it needs any further care under the skin. First step's been stripping the car back, removing the bodywork, which was finished today. Car's to be trailered into KW Historics this week to have the engine removed and then stripped down and inspected before being rebuilt. The rolling chassis will come back here in the meantime to be stripped and refurbished, before hopefully getting it all back together in time for spring Introducing the new lightweight, no-frills SEXIGE:

Right so it's not oldschool, but I thought I'd pop this topic up here since it's a similar sort of refresh/tidy-up many of us have done many times with our oldschoolers. Background on the car is that I imported it from Edinburgh, Scotland September '07 after it had spent its first 6 years on this earth with its first owner in London and Edinburgh. It arrived in NZ along with another for another NZ owner to beat the emissions laws that would ban their importing as of Jan 1 2008. There were no others in the country and to this day remain the only two. Now the Exige S1 is pretty much similar to an Elise S1 under the skin, basically just being a racing version thereof. Given that the Exige was derived from a competition car though, many of the peripheral items were low-volume bits (they only ever made 601 Exige S1s) and as such many of the bits and pieces had little or no rustproofing on them. As a result, after a few winters on salty UK roads they do start to look tired under the skin. My car was in superb condition throughout compared to many but it was always my intention to spend its first NZ winter stripping it back, giving it a good look-over and pretty much bringing it back to new condition underneath. This meant replacing all the bushes, balljoints, rod ends and cleaning up all the steelwork beneath as well as the chassis and all its hardpoints (which, because they're in aluminum, stay in pretty good nick). Given that the clutch was starting to show signs of wear and started slipping badly after NZ Autocar magazine had it to do their 0-60 tests for the magazine, this would be replaced at the same time. Also, given that the front pulleys made a bid for freedom off the end of the crankshaft in November, it was decided the front end of the engine would get all new pulleys and cam-drive to be on the safe side. This would be easiest done with the engine out, and we'd also use this time to diagnose a clatter that had started in the engine over the Easter break... we suspected something amiss in the valvetrain of the mightily fragile Rover K16-VHPD lump. Anyway... on with the show!

I think they're called Hamilton Spray Painters or something similar... we worked with them to develop a process for texture-coating carbon-fibre tube for a project we were working on.

Wrap some insulation tape around the splines and (over the) clip... that'll form a kind of ramp over the clip. Chuck a bit of lube on top of the tape and the boot will slide over easy as pie with no risk of the clip cutting the boot. Once it's on, remove the tape and the job's a carrot!

Hahahaha of course they do! Its british Unless your car's made almost entirely of plastic and aluminium

Thing with POR15 is you need to use their kit. Some Marineclean and some MetalPrep will make it work wonders. I did the rocker cover and oil cap (mild steel pressings) on the TR7 in that about 7 years ago. After soaking in oil, suffering knocks and general wear and tear it looks every bit as shiny and unmarked as it did the day I painted it.

POR15 will do the trick nicely. You could also powdercoat, which would be easier and possibly cheaper, but the finish won't be as durable as a properly-applied POR15 finish.

I get that when driving... just when I think I'm pretty handy behind the wheel, someone shows me up BIG time and makes me look like a soccermom (/dad?). Even more amusing when they're female

PM'd

I work as an Engineer and a Metallurgist. 5 years at varsity and ten years in the trade.... it's kinda "what I do"

This is correct.... but "rust" is just a name we give to Iron oxide. Most metals corrode in just the same manner as Steel/Iron does. Lead oxidises, copper oxidises, aluminium oxidises, zinc oxidises etc.. In the end, the deal with galvanic corrosion is more one related to area. If you use alloy (higher in the galvanic series) rivets to hold together a couple of sheets of stainless steel (lower in the galvanic series) and expose it to saltwater (or road-spray), it'll corrode like buggery because all of the surface area of the less-reactive stainless is concentrated into corroding the small aluminium rivet. If you use a stainless bolt to hold a couple of sheets of Aluminium together, the same thing happens but the small bolt's influence on the large alloy plates is minor and the Aluminium will corrode at such a slow rate as not to be noticeable. All of this is way off topic of course, I was just rebutting the statement that softer metals galvanically corrode in preference to harder ones. If this was the case, all of the (soft) copper wiring that's earthed to your car's steel chassis would corrode away to nothing long before bubbles of rust started to show on the chassis.

Basically as I said... the lower carbon you can get, the better. Unless you're looking at using it for any more heavily structural applications

lead isnt a ferrous metal hence it dosnt rust

You're correct, galvanic corrosion occurs when two dissimilar metals are in contact with eachother in the presence of oxygen and an electrolyte. While it may be a rule of thumb that (automotively) softer metals are typically higher in the galvanic series, it's not entirely true and the mechanism for galvanic corrosion has nothing to do with the hardness of the material. Copper and Lead are EXTREMELY corrosion resistant (lead is often used unpainted on house roofs and doesn't corrode even after decades in the weather) compared to steel, yet is much much softer It's strange that you say brass is used in spot-welding. Typically, spot-welds are a pure-fusion weld meaning that the only molten metal in the weld-pool is that of the two parent metals being joined. You're sure that a brass (or more likely bronze) filler-run hasn't been used on the spot-welds as a cosmetic finisher as is common automotive procedure. Brazing (molten bronze) is often used on older cars as a semi-structural and cosmetic inert filler. Leadlining is extremely common in older cars for filling seams and other panelling imperfections (particularly in heavily curved areas). In an age before polymeric bodyfillers lead made an effective and easily workable filler. Of course these days, panel-pressing techniques are such that skim-filling on panels is no longer required. As for the government curriculum..... don't necessarily believe everything they tell you. Hell they'll teach you that anthropogenic global warming's fact when, in reality it's anything but

Panel steel is nowhere NEAR 2mm thick. Even heavy duty panels like you'd find on utes is typically only 0.9mm or so thick. 2mm steel is typically only used on car panels for welded reinforcements and attachment brackets etc. Lead and Brass is typically only used for seam-filling. As for galvanic corrosion, it's got NOTHING to do with how hard/soft they are, it's about where they rank in the galvanic series (see here http://www.corrosionsource.com/handbook/galv_series.htm). Stainless steel is a very noble steel and is pretty soft compared to carbon steel, yet carbon steel will corrode much more readily.

Nothing like recycling. Panel steel from other cars and appliances is generally good as it's aged steel, which typically will form pretty well

For my money I'd be doing it in POR15. That stuff is harder than a coffin nail and will look as good in 20 years as it does the day you apply it. They also do an inside-tank treatment that will line the tank with an epoxy to stop it rusting from the inside out. Their tank treatment will also fill any pinholes etc.

True... but a drop-tank is a modification, which is judged differently. You might very well be alright but I'm just saying that it'd be heartbreaking to do all the work only to find that it's an illegal mod since it's not the sort of thing you can easily reverse like swapping out springs/shocks etc.