Lotus, round two

The month of May is always busy. This month had an extra, unforeseen challenge, the death of the family cat. She was old. A year ago she developed diabetes so I have been giving her insulin shots twice a day. What finally did her in was kidney failure.

On the Saturday before Mothers Day I decided that whatever was wrong was not getting better on its own so I took her to the vet. The blood tests indicated significant loss of kidney function. The only thing they could do was admit her and put her on an IV to try to dilute her blood enough to give her kidneys a chance to catch up. I visited her first thing Sunday morning, then went to the shop as usual, then straight on to dinner at my mother-in-law's house. No time to write my blog entry.

On Monday morning I went to visit her again, only to find out she had passed away over night. Not a surprise, yet sad nonetheless.

What I accomplished last week was to apply a coat of high-build primer to the Lotus. It went rather well, but after a lot of wet sanding with #400 paper I still had some spots with tiny air bubbles, probably caused by applying too thick of a coat. I also took off more primer than I should have at the rear end.

While waiting for the paint to dry I did more grinding on the E9 RH tail light patches. I finally got around to grinding down the lower-left inside corner, giving it a nice radius. In the end a few places needed more epoxy filler. Somehow I managed to not get a picture of this, but I did take some of the paint work.





Today the goal was to fix the air bubbles and end up ready to shoot color. I think I made it. I used brown to help show how far down to sand. Just after the first coat flashed off it started to rain, but after a couple hours the sun came back and it turned out fine.

While I was waiting for the rain to stop I decided to get started on the rusted out area above the RH tail light. This spot extends into the flange that forms the truck opening lip, a rubber gasket runs in the flange. Lots of curves here. After all the trouble I had fabricating the rear windowsill patch I decided to build this one up. I worked on the piece that forms the bottom of the flange (hard to describe since the "bottom" is angled about forty-five degrees. First I made a cardboard pattern, then cut the sheet metal with a die grinder and ground that to the final shape. As I was fitting it I discovered that in addition to having curved edges top and bottom (it's about 0.75 in. wide) it needs to have a twist in it. I'll start with that next time.

Mostly Lotus

The Honolulu All British Car Day is coming up at the end of this month. If I am to have any hope of showing my Lotus I have to fix the big scratch some griefer thought would make a statement. Last week I bought the paint, spray gun, and associated stuff, but Sunday was the Haleiwa Century Ride so no car work got done. Today was the day to get to it.

The first thing to do was to sand out the scratch. For that I used #180 wet/dry, wet. (Make a note: next time bring a bigger bucket.) This revealed four areas where the scratch was especially deep. To fill those areas I used my POR-15 Epoxy Filler. After sanding down the first application, still using #180 but in my short sanding block, I could see where I needed to extend the filler a little further, so I applied a little more and when that was hard I finished bringing it down the level of the paint surface. The next phase will be to use high-build primer to level out the whole thing. I'm thinking about working on that at home. We'll see.





While I was working on the scratch I also worked on the E9. First I ground down the welds I finished with last time, then when I applied to filler on the Lotus I also used some to fill in the gaps around the E9 tail light patches. After grinding that down, first with my grinder, then with #50 paper in my long sanding block, I had a few more low spots, so when I applied the second round of filler to the Lotus I also applied some to the E9. I did not have time to grind that down.



I'll close with a note about how busy a week it has been. Saturday night was our gamelan concert, so we had a rehearsal Wednesday night, dress rehearsal Friday night, and a two o'clock call on Saturday to get everything ready. Friday after was the monthly after work party at Asian Studies, which we might have skipped if it were not also a first birthday party for a friend's baby boy. Can't miss that. Then on Saturday morning there was a brunch to honor Ric Trilillos, who received a best student mentor award. Working at the shop today I felt like I was in a fog.

Here's a pic of the gamelan, minus players. I don't have any pictures of us playing, because I am always on stage. For this concert I mostly sang, but I did drum one piece.

Reinforced the RH tail light, Haleiwa Ride

Yesterday was the Haleiwa Metric Century ride, which I rode with my wife. So no work done on any of our cars. The previous Sunday I did work on the E9, I just never got around to writing about it.

When I welded the latest patch in place I thought I had a problem where the upper edges attached. The tabs were too small to weld. Since I was out of time I had to wait a week to test the welds.

First thing I did was to grind down the beads. Sure enough, neither end was convincingly secure, and some of the beads toward the left end of the bottom were not very solid. I decided to strengthen the sides with new material on the back side and redo the welds along the bottom.



This is a view of the outside after grinding down the welds. On the left side the weakness is caused by a hole where the original metal was too thin. The tab just below that extends to the left turned out well, but too small to be relied on to carry the load. Above the hole what metal remains is very thin.



Same location viewed from inside the trunk. If the original flange were solid all the way done my design would have worked, but that notch where I cut out some rust weakened the joint.



The problem with the outboard end was the joint, which lacked any overlap. Here I have already ground away the area, to prepare for welding.



Another look at the entire tail light area, At this point I did the POR-15 wash and metal prep, and when that was dry I shot everything with Weld-Thru primer.



The two reinforcements, after metal prep treatment. The one on the left goes inboard. Note the Z-bend at one end.



View from outside after new welds.



Reinforcements welded in place.

Like I said, yesterday was the Haliewa Century Ride. I managed to take a few photos with my old cell phone, not nearly as good as my Nikon, but nice just the same. The weather was perfect, the best Haleiwa Ride I can remember. Usually the wind is ferocious, and some years it rains throughout the day. Last year my wife shreadded a tire, and we stopped to help two more riders with mechanical problems, so it was a long day. This year my wife was riding on a broken toe so we only did half distance, and without any interruptions and despite a long stop at Ted's Bakery we arrived back in Haleiwa around 10:30! We had planned to eat lunch at Haleiwa Joe's, so we sat outside on the lawn to wait until they opened.

Fixed the Camry sway bar

The headline says it all. My shop time was taken up replacing the rear sway bar on our 87 Toyota Camy station wagon.

Getting the old bar out was a snap. The only hard part was breaking loose the 14mm nuts on the links. My standard length open-end wrench could not generate sufficient torque. Fortunately the shop has a set of Snap-On extended length 12-point box wrenches, and one of those did the trick.



The big challenge was installing the new bar. I suppose that removing things like the rear suspension mounting bracket and parts of the fuel tank would allow the bar to slip easily into position, but I was determined not to have a small job turn into a big one. After many attemts, starting from both sides, I ended up starting on the right. The key move was loosening the bolt that holds on the plastic fuel tank cover, on the right side. Pushing the bracket down gave just enough clearance to slip the end of the bar past the fuel tank mount.



My one mistake was starting with the bar on the wrong side of the brake line. After it was in I realized that there was no way to slip the off-set end past the brake line, so I had to disconnect the line. That meant bleeding the brakes at the end, but very little air snuck in during the few seconds the line was separated.

Broken Camry, more E9 welding

The first order of business today was to discover the source of a thumpy sound coming the the rear suspension of our 1986 Toyota Camry station wagon. Turned out to be a broken anti-roll bar (a.k.a. sway bar).



Last week I decided to fill a gap between the lower tail light patch and the existing sheet metal with a little doubler. It worked great, but it interfered with the fit of the upper half of the patch. Work on the E9 today began with cutting a notch in the upper patch to clear the doubler.



Next came fitting the inboard end. I had two height changes to deal with, one going one way and one the other way. It took a few cuts and a little hammering, but it all worked out.



The last thing to do before welding was to cut away the top edge in order to create the 3 3/16 in. opening for the tail light. I left some material at what will be the lower left corner of the opening to create a nicely radiused corner.



For some reason the welding did not go as well as it did last time. I was not getting good penetration. Next time I think I'll try warming up on some scrap first.