Don’t get carried away, will hopefully get box back in tomorrow but will likely be mid week before I can try the clutch again as there’s a few jobs to get done before I can fire her up.
I’ve spent the last few weeks I’ve been on & off reading your thread from the beginning Kyle. I’m really impressed with the effort you’ve gone to. Such detailed reports into all of your projects, challenges & results. It’s an extremely comprehensive thread and it’s been a pleasure to read. Fantastic work!
Glad to see you’ve got what seems like a resolution for your clutch issue. You can always rely on seriouslylotus to really get stuck into helping out
Cheers,
Oli
Cheers Oli, I’m glad you enjoyed it - I enjoy writing mainly for my benefit, so if one other person enjoys it too then I suppose that’s a bonus!
I do have a weekly update though, so here goes.
My clutch pressure plate bolts got delayed and as a result the clutch wasn’t back on the car till mid week. Such was my apprehension to get it back on, I even calibrated my torque wrench to rule out the chance of me massively over/under torquing the pressure plate…
When refitting, I did much the same as last time - looking out for any possibility that I could have screwed things up but it really is a simple process. Clutch back on, centred up and now just needed to organise a helping hand to get the box back in.
I got the box in on Wednesday, it’s always around this time where I think “this is impossible, even for a computer” and consider getting the subframe off!
But with a little jiggling it went in, and I got the nod of approval
I took my time over a couple of nights getting the rest bolted back up, I strained the oil and put it back in (the strainer picked up a fair bit of RTV ‘offcuts’ so probably not a bad exercise anyway!) and by the end of last night the car was in theory ready to fire… but I left it till today out of fear 
I got some other finishing touches done this week too:
- New studs/bolts for the exhaust manifold
- New Bosch 4.9 LSU lambda sensor, this now my third since the ECU went on… I really need to get to the bottom of why I’m killing them, but for now I have EGO feedback again.
- New Air Filter setup
For the filter, I didn’t want to put the TRD airbox back on, it’s a massive faff to change filters and I’m really not convinced that it added much noise to the SC car (in contrast to my NA car which it transformed). I got an ITG Stab99 airbox (76mm inlet) and managed to get hold of their Elise/Exige specific bracket for the rollover bar support, added to a length of 76mm silicone hose and I had a relatively inexpensive induction kit setup. As I no longer run a MAF, I could do away with various restrictions and complications for a nice clean setup.
Oh, last finishing touch - I added my SeriouslyLotus stud conversion kit. Makes fitting the wheels (particularly at chest height on the ramp) sooooo much easier, and they look cool too.
With all that done, I really had run out of excuses so I got on with the test. Car fired up on the button, and… Clutch worked fine!
Celebrated with a few laps of the cul-de-sac, and called it a day.
I can only conclude that the original clutch was dead on arrival, after going through the process twice I really can’t think of anything I could have cocked up.
Well done, great to see it moving under its own power again!
Top work and persistence
Thats a result! Have you be happy with that!
Super! Bet the neighbours followed your progress with interest.
I can’t believe you re-calibrated the torque thingy. How does a paint tin enter into the equation?
I zoomed in on the the figures and was back in my maths period, circa 1966. Didn’t understand it then. Don’t understand it now😳
I should imagine you’re feeling a bit more contented now - good to see it’s driving ok and like the others who comment, keep up the good work, I jump on here mainly to read rebuild threads
Good to hear you got sorted Kyle.
Cheers Jonny
Been a weekend of finishing touches, crazy how much time you can spend into the final few bits once the big jobs are done.
Wheel arch liners all cleaned up, replaced/refreshed my Bostick repair patches in a few places and got them fitted up.
I had a damaged splitter that required some attention. This is actually one of two OEM style splitters I’ve got, in addition to the Reverie carbon one that I still need to figure out a plan for. I damaged it a while ago, was barely noticeable and then I made it a (lot) worse by throwing it up into the loft without supporting the damaged bit very well… then it cracked properly.
I needed to paint/refresh a splitter up to use whilst waiting for me to figure out the Reverie one, so figured I’d fix this at the same time.
Don’t expect bodywork mastercraft, but I glassed it all in to bring some strength back.
Followed by a bit of sanding
Then some filling, then a lot of sanding
In all honesty I probably needed 2 or 3 more passes with the filler to form the shape back up properly but it’s solidly in the “it’ll do” category now, so got it primed up ready for paint along with the back clam panel.
Forgot to take some ‘done’ pictures, so will snap some of them fitted the car.
In the middle of all this, between paint coats etc the rear clam went back on. Garage suddenly feels massive again!
It was a little bit awkward to get it lined up properly, I actually fitted it with the rear grille still attached before it came off for paint, removing that first would have made things much easier. Bolted up in no time though, nothing really difficult there - and it allowed me to get the interior back in and cleaned up a bit as it had turned into a bit of a component dumping ground.
With the car largely back together on Sunday morning, I rolled it outside for a quick test and a wash. The test was just going up and down the road, just about got it into 3rd gear and so far no crunches, whining or clacking from the gearbox… which is a relief. Hopefully gears 4, 5 and 6 will be equally fine! The test did reveal though that my brakes are STILL not bled very well. I really dislike these 2pot calipers at the front, even despite all the tricks of inverting them and banging them with a mallet they always take me 2 or 3 goes at bleeding through. Very annoying, but I’ll not attempt it again until I can trigger ABS a couple of times - just to purge out any air I might have gathered in the ABS system somewhere.
Looking a bit odd without a splitter or spoiler, but still looking much better than it has for the last few months.
Spoiler, grille and splitter have since been refitted so today I just need to do a quick lights check for the MOT, and get the laptop out to try and tidy the idle tuning up a little bit. The big ITG filter has certainly had an impact, even though I’m running MAFless the duty cycle I have configured for the TB needs a tweak to allow for what I assume is a shed load more air flow.
I shall be following your results with the large ITG with interest
I always think they look weird with no rear wing at all
Great result, Kyle. Best I can offer in the car fettling department this week is: two cars washed . . . 
Great to see it all back together, really great job you’ve done over the winter Really good to see everyones cars coming back together
Looking really good Kyle and pleased its all working as it should.
Not sure on your brake bleeding tool, i used to use a pressure bleeder but now i use this type and it works perfectly jhttps://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/183393128594
Just open each nipple and pull the fluid through no fuss and no mess.
Cheers all, really happy to be at this point with it now. Hopefully a year of fun stuff now, like cleaning it… oh, and driving it.
Cheers Lee, I’m currently using a sealey bleeder - works fine for me usually - just if I fully drain the 2pot calipers I always end up with air on the inboard side (as the crossover pipe is at the bottom, there’s a pocket where you just can’t bleed it even with pressure). Eventually by inverting the caliper a few times and giving it a good shake you can get it all out… just to date I’ve failed to do it in a single sitting!
We could meet in a public location to go for a walk and assist in an accidental bleed…
MOT day! Spoiler alert, it failed.
I had the car booked in for 9am, there’s a tyre shop which I use a lot just over the road who also have some laser tracking gear so I’d arranged to get my front toe corrected there before the MOT.
It was really good to get the car out on the road, but it drove terribly with my eyeballed front toe. Lovely day to be crabbing around the road though
For the record my eyeball toe was 2deg in on one side and 1.5deg in on the other… I expected worse! They trued it up for me and the car felt so, so much nicer. Onto the MOT bay and I soon got a failure for fast idle emissions.
It wasn’t even close either, limit for CO was 0.2% and I scored 1.53% on the first attempt and 1.14% on the second… yikes. (lambda read 0.96 and minimal acceptable is 0.97).
This is the first MOT I’ve had done with the 2bular sports cat fitted, it’s supposed to be MOT-safe but who knows. The other factor is the ecu/map, specifically the parts of the map that I’ve been playing with (butchering) to smooth my idle out a bit. I was datalogging whilst the car was being tested and I could see them holding ~2.6k RPM for the fast idle test with 7% throttle.
What I can see from the logs is that my lambda reading matches that of the MOT readout, and it was hitting 0.96 lambda. Ideally it should be close to 1.0 here, and lower numbers = richer, so that would explain things a bit.
I’ve not really touched fuelling as part of my idle tuning, but I did mess around with ignition advance a bit, specifically I was backing it off loads just ‘above’ the RPM range for acceptable idle. This had the desired effect of letting my idle drop nice and smoothly, as originally it hung a little bit just outside of the range where idle speed control would kick in. Luckily I have all the tools at my disposal to replicate the test in my garage, and gauge results - so I’m fairly confident I can get it close to target before going for a retest.
The drive home was OK, few observations from the gearbox/clutch setup:
-
Usability is just like OEM, pedal bite point a little higher than before but I’m already used to it.
-
When applying throttle there’s no notable extra noise from the 3rd/4th gears. SSC warn you that they’re a bit louder than OEM but you can’t hear it whilst accelerating, on the overrun there’s a slight “wooo” noise, not quite a whine - but easily liveable for a road car, I think they sound cool.
-
The gearbox has a slight rattle on the overrun regardless of gears. I’m not overly concerned about this because my Elise used to do it a lot too. Rattle is probably the wrong word, but I tweaked a lot of it out with my Elise by rearranging gear cables and stuff like that -so maybe something I’ve just not put back exactly right on the rebuild. Bit of sponge here and there and I’m fairly confident it’ll be fine. Either that or the Diff I bought is a duff and will fail spectacularly any day now…
-
When giving it some gas, the shorter ratio of the FD is certainly noticeable compared to before but still very road biased. I think if you’d never driven one before, you’d never know - it feels great, but there’s certainly an added punch in the midrange… at least until…
-
I’m getting some WOT misfires. Checked the logs and can’t see anything obvious, no EML code etc. Might just be fouled up plugs particularly if my idle is running rich, and I had no working lambda sensor at all for the weeks leading up to SORN which meant the ECU was over correcting and throwing fuel at it anyway… I’ll give the plugs a clean out and try again, or at very least will go log some proper “pulls” so I can make sure things are happy, perhaps adding the mahoosive filter needs a bit of a map tweak too.
-
Brakes still need another bleed, but they’re road worthy at least (and an MOT pass!). I’ll get round to it.
To get around the issue for now could you create a MOT map and then revert?
Yep that’s the plan, just need some base maps from VW I guess?