Rear disc mounting bolts

PostPost by: bobashton » Sun Feb 27, 2011 9:44 pm

I'm currently in the process of changing from rotoflexes to Mick Miller drive shafts. Everything was going pretty smoothly removing the intermediate shafts and rotoflexes but I am now unable to withdraw the brake discs from the outer drive shaft flange. The bolt heads are all facing outboard i.e. up against the disc rotor, they foul the strut/hub assembly when attempting to withdraw them in that direction. On checking my workshop manual the orientation of the bolts looks to be correct.

It looks as if my options are to either: (a)withdraw the hub and then extract the outer driveshaft or, more easily, (b)grind off the heads and withdraw the studs inboard, they are to be discarded anyway. Initial efforts to withdraw the hub have inevitably failed, researching this forum suggests that is not unusual!

I know that work on lotuses is seldom easy but this seems like a lot of work on what could have been a routine brake disc change. Am I missing something embarrassingly obvious here or has the previous owner mounted the bolts the wrong way round?

Any views or observations would be greatly appreciated before I go to work with the angle grinder!

Regards,

Bob
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PostPost by: paddy » Sun Feb 27, 2011 10:05 pm

Did you remove the caliper? Without the caliper, if you rotate the hub shaft there should be one position where the head of the bolt will pass past the bearing housing and you can remove the bolt. I can't remember if it is on the caliper side or the other side, but it's definitely possible. Then, obviously, rotate the shaft by 120 degrees and repeat for the next bolt.

Removing the hub, and then the shaft, is best done with the whole assembly out of the car (although it is sometimes possible in-situ).

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PostPost by: garyeanderson » Sun Feb 27, 2011 10:10 pm

Please see photo and read the inset print

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PostPost by: bobashton » Sun Feb 27, 2011 10:22 pm

Paddy, Gary,

Thanks for the quick reply. Just nipped into the garage and withdrawn them, they came out at the 12 o'clock position after scraping a bit of crud of the housing.

:oops: Looks like I did miss the embarrassingly obvious after all! Tips like that are never in the workshop manuals which proves the worth of this forum

Thanks again

Bob
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PostPost by: ivor badger » Mon Feb 28, 2011 4:21 pm

From my Imp rallying aquaintances, putting the bolts in the wrong (awkward) way reduces the chance of Rotoflex failure. Ie, the way you found them.
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PostPost by: billwill » Mon Feb 28, 2011 7:03 pm

ivor badger wrote:From my Imp rallying aquaintances, putting the bolts in the wrong (awkward) way reduces the chance of Rotoflex failure. Ie, the way you found them.



Which do you consider the 'wrong' way?

I seem to remember that the official Lotus Manual says all Rotoflex & brake disc bolts to have heads on the outwards side.


Bye the way, this topic of mine on changing the doughnuts, shows the bolts bein tapped back into place over the shoulder of the rear casting.

elan-f14/replacing-the-doughnuts-t16456.html?hilit=%20doughnuts
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PostPost by: bobashton » Mon Feb 28, 2011 8:56 pm

The fault was mine, the bolts were correctly aligned, I'd had a long day and handn't spotted the devious way of extracting each bolt at one particular position at the top of the housing. When Bill and Gary were kind enough to point this out to me both discs were off within a couple of minutes.

I had been lying on my back underneath the back end for a couple of hours trying to fathom out the (now) obvious simple solution but started looking a ridiculously hard alternatives like drawing off the hub and then the outer driveshaft.

As I said earlier, for me this demonstrates the true value of this forum. Thanks again everyone.

Bob
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PostPost by: ivor badger » Mon Feb 28, 2011 10:27 pm

billwill wrote:
ivor badger wrote:From my Imp rallying aquaintances, putting the bolts in the wrong (awkward) way reduces the chance of Rotoflex failure. Ie, the way you found them.



Which do you consider the 'wrong' way?

I seem to remember that the official Lotus Manual says all Rotoflex & brake disc bolts to have heads on the outwards side.


Bye the way, this topic of mine on changing the doughnuts, shows the bolts bein tapped back into place over the shoulder of the rear casting.

elan-f14/replacing-the-doughnuts-t16456.html?hilit=%20doughnuts


The Imp trick was to fit the bolts with the nut always on the Rotoflex side. This means the bolt is less flexible in the spider and the Rotoflex less likely to fail, well that's the theory. It means taking the shafts out the diff to fit the bolts, hence its awkward to do and thus the wrong way.
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