I use a clay mitt. I just ensure when I clay that I have a fresh bucket of shampoo as lubricant. One pass , one dip and wash , next pass …
Thanks, Kyle. Think I might spend the money I am saving by being at home on a professional job when things get “back to normal” if they ever do!
Yup, there’s some proper talent out there when it comes to corrective polishing. I think the industry suffered a bit in the same way photography did. Relatively low cost of entry, lots of people “having a go” with a fancy website etc but not actually having much/any real world experience. Most of those in the detailing world seem to have faded away now as it’s pretty hard to make good money doing it unless you’re extremely good.
The young lad who carried out a full paint rectification on our Elise realised during the restoration he had way undercharged for the work, he said it took him longer than doing a Range rover due to all the curves. He is a properly skilled lad and highly trained, we were so pleased all our cars now go to him at purchase to be refinished and coated before we really drive them.
I agree there are some right dodgy ones out there who bought the kit and advertised detailing and wrapping services as they saw a quick buck in it.
Couple of small updates, first up I picked up some new front ZZRs. This is to sort the excessively worn and punctured NSF tyre. My OSF is still really healthy so I’ll put that to one side to act as another puncture spare.
I also grabbed some new brake pads. I’ve talked about this on and off in this thread but I’ve always used Pagid RS4-2’s across both of my Lotus’. I was generally happy with these pads on my Elise as they were quite, not particularly dusty and could last as long as I did on track. People claim they become a bit wooden <50% thickness which on reflection I think I agree with. I’ve had quite consistent brake pad wear issues on my Exige so far, I went through 2 full sets of RS4-2s pretty much last year, the car started with “half a set” which I destroyed in one trackday, but I put that down to the corroded discs I had at that time. The next set were brand new and I got them down to around 25% by mid summer, so they’re in the emergency “get me home” box now. Then the set I have in the car now are already down to 40ish % so they’ve got one more trackday in them at a push.
I’d put off trying RS14s and similar pads purely because I can not tolerate squeel, it eats me from the inside and is one of those minor things which completely sucks the enjoyment out of a car for me. When I first got my Elise somebody told me that RS14s squeel a bit, but since then I’ve had a bunch of people tell me that they don’t so that’s what I’ve ordered this time around to see if they last a little longer. Even if that’s at the detriment to disc wear I don’t care too much, just want to balance it out a tad.
If I get to the end of this year and I’m still eating pads, then I’ll look at more drastic options such as 4pots or the like.
I’ll keep the 40% RS4-2s to hand, if the 14’s do make too much noise on the road I’ll simply use the 4-2s as road pads and the 14s as track pads.
Onto tonight, as has been mentioned in threads by [mention]matt447[/mention] and [mention]The Hornet[/mention] I’ve become a bit nervous about the lift bolts that I changed over winter. Both Matt and Hornet had theirs come loose after being worked on, despite the service manual not specifying loctite this seemed to be the resolution after the bolts could be fished out of the engine…
As I changed my bolts over the winter and did NOT loctite them, I decided to get a move on and get them refitted with the blue stuff. Slight complication since my original swap since the charge cooler was now in the way, and is full of water… luckily I’ve had a plan up my sleeve for that which I executed with minimal mess tonight:
Using some excess hose from the proalloy kit and some rubber corks, I could bung it off fairly quickly and prevent a full system drain from being required. Once it was off it was rinse/repeat of the original job.
I opened the cam cover and … WTF where are my lift bolts???
The little bastards are nowhere to be seen 
Just kidding, whipped them out and after a quick clean stuck some loctite on them:
Re-torqued them in so fingers crossed that’s it now. I cleaned both the bolts and the receiving thread the best I could, but still a bit nervous that surrounding oil will compromise the effectiveness of the loctite but I’ll just have to life with that! I still really do think that the bolts must need to be severely mishandled to come out in the first place…
All in all the charge cooler added about 15mins to the cam cover job, so not the end of the world really.
FLOL @ The missing bolts.
You cheeky scamp you!
Useful update!
Had me fooled there, Kyle. I’m sure you are wise to check it out. If it’s a perennial ( see use of perennial on another recent thread) problem I’m surprised it has not come up before on here
Just went down to finish the job, only had to pop the chargecooler back on and bolt it down. 2/4 nuts put on, third one slipped out of my hand and fell in the pit of doom - a small casted dimple just below the fuel rail…
I managed to lift the CC unit slightly without taking the hoses off which allowed me to at least take the fuel rail plastic cover off… but no chance of getting the nut out with my fingers without taking the injectors and fuel rail out… 
I’ve ordered a flexible claw grabber thing, hopefully that’ll do the job… lost patience with it now so I’ll come back to it at the weekend. 5mins away from being finished, always the bloody way.
Those dimple things are expensive for what they are as well ( assuming we are talking about the same thing! )
you need a magnet on a stick 
I don’t think so, it’s just a casted ‘hole’ in the engine block that it sits in - water often pools there too if you’ve been jetwashing the car.
I have one, but two problems with it - one the aperture I’ve got available for access is too small for the ‘head’ of my magnet and two, the biggest issue - the nut isn’t magnetic 
piece of stick and bluetac then 
I can see this ending up with a blob of bluetac also being stuck down there awaiting recovery. I’ll give it a try 
[quote=Fonzey post_id=240187 time=1588344519 user_id=31614]
Pit of doom - YouTube
[/quote]
Well done that man 
Classic! Sounds just like me in my garage. But I hit the Tourets limit at times.
Quick update, bit of a disappointing one all round!
First up my exhaust system, it turns out that trying to get something done within lockdown circumstances at such a long distance was too ambitious - so all parties made the decision to just bail out for now and return the stock exhaust to me so I could be sure the car was road-ready for when lockdown is lifted. No hard feelings, but may re-evaluate options closer to home once we’re free, I’m still keen to progress with a full system replacement that I can have some input on with regards to requirements and spec.
Once I got the exhaust back, I had to get back to work putting it on the car which I took on last weekend - nothing exciting to report here except my donut gasket between the manifold and cat is getting a little second hand now and has a bit of a split in it. It doesn’t seem to blow yet, but I wouldn’t risk a trackday or any big mileage on it so I’ve got another one on order. After I fitted the system, I left it 24hours just for the assembly paste on the slip joint to go off (these can leak if not gunked up and clamped right, not helped by the poor fitting 2bular backbox…) and the following lunchtime (yesterday) I fired it up to check for leaks whilst still on stands. All sounded well, happy days.
Last night I lowered the car to its wheels and intended to reverse it out of the garage to re-arrange a bit, and the car wouldn’t start. It was cranking fine but wasn’t firing. For some reason I’d grabbed the spare key fob for it so I assumed it was an immobiliser issue… went rooting around for the other key and felt myself feeling dizzier and dizzier. Opened up the other garage door for a bit of air then caught a reflection under the car - it had been pissing petrol out onto the garage floor!
I pushed the car out of the garage and got to work cleaning up, I was pretty sure I knew what the issue was which was really disappointing - as I guess deep down I knew that I’d not done something properly over winter. I wasn’t expecting it to fail, but clearly I was subconsciously not happy with how the fuel pump replacement went.
I had an hour or so, so decided to crack on getting the interior out - something I now have down to a fine art. Sure enough, 40mins later and I had the culprit:
The high pressure fuel line (right of shot) was popped out of its recess, so petrol (when the car was cranked) was just pissing upwards at the hatch, then down the sides of the fuel tank onto the floor. I recall having difficulties with this clip when I replaced the fuel pump which is I guess why I knew deep down what the problem would be. The clip was still in its grooves but it had popped back slightly allowing the fuel pressure to push the hose out. Obviously I’m annoyed this happened, but I’m so fortunate that it happened in the comfort of my own garage rather than on the 350 or so miles I’ve driven, not to mention on the dyno at Dans!
I can’t bear thinking about the implications of this popping off at speed on the road, airflow under the car washing the fuel towards the exhaust… shudder.
Luckily I quite quickly figured out the error I made last time, it’s hard to explain in text but the fuel line has a rubber lip around it - it was the perfect fit to sit flush with the top of the fuel pump assembly and so this is how I had it before. The clip then sort of forces its way over the top of it to (in theory) sandwich it all in place. Fitting the clip like this though is very forced, and this should have been a clue that I’d done it wrong before.
The correct process is to actually push the hose (quite hard) down into the pump so that the rubber lip squeezes in like an o’ring, and presumably sits inside an unsighted groove within the assembly itself. This allows the clip to go on so, so much easier - and the whole thing quite literally clicks together.
I cleaned up the best I could then gave the car a few hours to ‘evaporate’. Cranked it up quickly before going to bed last night and it ran fine for a few minutes with no sign of leakage. Interior is still scattered all over the garage so I guess that’s a job for tonight… but I am tempted to leave the fuel pump somewhat accessible for a few miles first just to stress test it out a bit.
Lesson learned, I’m not a mechanic and quite often I’m doing jobs for the first time - but I am disappointed to have cocked up something so critical to safety. If something doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t!
Dont beat yourself up about it. Mistake was made, mistake was fixed and car is fine now.
Win!
We’ve all made mistakes. Car, you, house is fine!
Years ago I was working on my Yamaha R1 bike engined Westfield. I started the engine after doing some work on the car and left it running as I put the tools away. Couldn’t find my 13mm spanner anywhere. No worries, it will turn up. Got in the car, pushed the paddle to engage first, a few revs to pull out of the garage and BANG, SCRAPE, BANG, CLATTER, THUD, BANG. Killed the engine, started to investigate. The 13mm spanner must have been in the centre tunnel, had fell onto the prop joint and propelled itself around 
Small update to make, the car is back together now after the vpower incident and it seems like I got away without any lasting damage or disruption. I idled the car on/around the driveway for ages to try and make sure there was no further leakage until (ironically) I ran out of petrol.
Once that drama was dealt with I got on with a bit of a treat… I bought myself my first ever private registration earlier in winter and finally got round to assigning it and getting the plates made up. I was never really a fan of private plates, still think they’re a waste of money - but this is my plate on Forza Motorsport so when I realised it was ‘only’ £250 I went for it
Went for a full sized plate on the rear and the front one is the exact width of the number plate plinth. Nothing makes my teeth itch more than a number plate that’s too small for its plinth.
With that done I also got my front tyres replaced for the new ZZRs I bought some weeks ago. The tread levels of my OSF was absolutely fine (almost new) so kept that as a space, but the NSF had some bad inside shoulder wear and a puncture - so that’s int bin.
Today I put some tax back on the car and took it for a shakedown run for petrol and essentials. Only 7 miles or so, but the car felt really, really good - probably a result of sitting on the sofa for two months solid but it felt loads quicker than it did earlier in the year… had that zing to the power delivery where you keep expecting it to tail off, but it doesn’t and keeps shoving you right till the gear change. Aside from that the brakes felt good too, I’m still on my old pads but I’ve all but eliminated the deadzone now in the top of the pedal travel so there’s an instant response now and I think I’ve even got rid of some rattles with my express interior refit, the car almost felt refined Days like this really make me feel like I’ve got a car for life, and I was only nipping to the petrol station and back!