wdb's S3 SE adventures

[wdb]

I've made threads about other cars I've owned and worked on, and although that does not seem to be as much of a norm on this forum I hope it will be accepted. I recently became caretaker of a 1967 Elan S3 SE DHC, purchased from its original owner. He put 80-ish thousand enthusiastic miles on the car under his tenure, including doing a bit of hillclimb racing and several long journeys across swaths of the US. It had literally been part of his family for almost 60 years. When I discuss its acquisition I use the word 'adopted' rather than 'bought' because that is what it feels like.

I'll use this thread to document the work I do to the car as I go. My main objective -- for now at least -- is to bring the car back towards as-new mechanical performance while preserving as much as possible. The car is largely original, and had been well maintained by the original owner, so it still has its original paint for example. But 80K miles and 60-odd years is still a lot of use and so I have some work ahead.

Here is the car in Al's garage, before it came to reside with us. Yes he has a two post lift! It came in handy as we had to replace the LH motor mount and do some other things before I made the 1-1/2 hour drive back to my place.

Here it is in front of its current digs.

[gjz30075]

Very nice! I like your approach to preservation. Looking forward to updates.

Do you plan on going to the Pittsburgh LOG?

[wdb]

Very nice! I like your approach to preservation. Looking forward to updates.

Do you plan on going to the Pittsburgh LOG?

Thanks for the kind words. I have no idea what/when that is, I'll have to do some research. But I have attended events in Pittsburgh in the past so it's a definite maybe. In this car I think it might be a 2-day trip though.

[elanner]

If you changed the LH mount you might expect to see the RH mount fail soon. My admittedly limited experience shows that they like to fail together (the stiff new one overloading the flabby old one, I suspect).

Nick

[gjz30075]

https://lotusltd.com/log44/

[wdb]

If you changed the LH mount you might expect to see the RH mount fail soon. My admittedly limited experience shows that they like to fail together (the stiff new one overloading the flabby old one, I suspect).

Nick

Agreed! The RH mount is a much easier job and was done earlier by the previous owner.

https://lotusltd.com/log44/

Thanks for that.

[wdb]

My first order of business was suspension work. I wanted to replace the Rotoflex donuts with CV joints; yes I know I said "preserve", but this seems to me to be as much of a reliability issue as anything else, and although I know it will change the way the rear of the car responds I think it is worth doing. Also on the drive home it became quite apparent that at least one of the rear shocks was in bad shape. When I got home I verified that the LR corner was completely undamped. Al (previous owner) thought he had replaced the rears at some point, but he recommended doing the fronts, so I went ahead with plans to replace all four corners.

The first thing I noticed is that it appears as though the rear shocks have been replaced. The lower spring perch is cut off, I assume for wheel clearance; I know that Al had put +2 wheels on the car at one time, this may have been for those. There is also a threaded insert, which I have yet to explore. Also the caliper bolts are safety wired, is that a factory feature?

I thought I may as well disassemble everything so that I can build a complete list of parts needed. Removing the rears first, because that seemed to be the tougher task, I immediately ran into an issue: LOTACONES. Or is it lotocones, or lotucones -- I believe I've seen all those spellings. Here they are, out of the car. The two-piece unit is the LH item.

And here are the lotacone bolts. They look so innocent sitting there, but they are only sitting there as the result of multiple days in the garage and multiple trips to local parts houses. Left to right: the first two behaved themselves, sort of; none of them came out easily, all of them fought removal right until the end. Bolt #3: the socket is a formerly 1/2" socket that I ground out to 9/16" at the far end, tapering it down gradually; then I heated it up, shoved it onto the rounded-off bolt head, and beat on it mercilessly until the bolt head yielded as seen in front of it. That was a day all by itself. The final bolt ultimately yielded to a reverse drill bit. Highly recommended.

The good news is that the threads survived the ordeal in pretty fine shape. The frame towers are old and somewhat rusty but still feel very solid. I've cleaned them up as much as I can and will follow up with rust-stopping paint. I also plan to fit small diameter springs that will allow me to assemble the whole works on the bench, then install. Next up: disassemble the rear struts, then on the front end!

[Ray419G]

Nice car, looks like you have a great project. Yes the rear caliper bolts are wire locked as standard. I found the rear suspension can be one of the more challenging parts of an Elan to work on, the front end is straightforward in comparison

Ray.