Memorial Day weekend. We spent a good part of Saturday out on the neighbor's pontoon boat. We cruised over to a nice bar on Fox Lake and had a leisurely lunch (a little food with a lot of liquids), followed by a leisurely cruise back to the cottage. Sunday we did some movement of piers and boat lifts and some more leisurely liquid libation 125. By Monday I was pretty toasted from the two days of sun, external liquids and internal liquids so I planned a few hours of garaging.
The first task was to remove the rear axles which require that you drive out a roll pin. These 3/16 inch pins were petrified into place so it took quite a bit of beating with various sized drifts, ratchet wrench extensions, hammers and other weapons of mass destruction. While hammering assay on the pin. I had to take care not to slip and hammer my hand that was holding the weapon locator (drift) in place. If I slipped, I think I would have flattened a finger or destroyed a knuckle. Took about 45 minutes per pin. Pretty stubborn but eventually they gave up and popped out allowing the axles to be removed. I could then take the trans out of the chassis and plop it onto an old steel milk crate for further inspection.
A mistake I made along the disassembly way was not breaking loose the 1 ½ inch nuts holding on the rear wheel hubs before I pulled out the axles. Those are the things that hold the lug studs that you bolt the wheels to. Well, the Europa's rear hub nut is torqued down to 200 foot pounds. Quite a lot of oomph to torque it down. Quite a lot more oomph to get them off. And now that I had the axles off the trans, I had no leverage to un-torque those big nuts. I tried putting the assembly into my small table vice attached with two small bolts to my work bench which by the way bears an amazing resemblance to an old kitchen counter we used to have.
As I worked on the nut with a BF wrench, all I did was move the entire work bench. By the way, the 1 ½ inch BE wrench I use to apply leverage comes courtesy of LOG 22. You remember the Lotus Owners Gathering held in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin? You don't? Well go and check your back issues of Lotus Notus. Go Ahead. I'll wait.... OK, you're back? Good. So anyway, Rose & Mark Plechaty ran the show (and a great show it was) and Lotus Corps helped out. It was a Lotus LTD event so we can't technically say that it was our event, but we sure did most of the work. So anyway. Mark wanted to have something different for trophies. Something you would remember. He found some huge cheapie wrenches and had stickers made up that said LOG 22 and applied them to the wrenches. So for say first place in the show, you got a 3 foot long, 2" wrench that said "First place Elan LOG 22". Pretty cool and pretty practical. as you could keep your trophies hanging in the garage and actually use them once in a while. Let's call them "trophy wrenches". So I got 3rd place in the Elan category, a 1½ inch "trophy/wrench" which I was now using to try and break loose those nuts.
I put the axle/hub/rear link on the floor next to the work bench with a 3' monkey wrench on the axle. Next I attached the 2' long 1 ½" wrench on the nut and tried to leverage off the nut with one foot on the monkey wrench and one foot on the trophy wrench. No luck. I would push on one and lift myself up. Needed some assistance. A little extra weight. Ever play twister? I guess it could be fun with lots of liquor and loose women. Well, I had some beer and my trophy wench wife which was close enough. so I decided to play a garage twister game with her to try and get these nuts off (ahem). Sue came out to the garage and I had her stand on the monkey wrench. I easily lifted her svelte 120 lbs. off the ground with one push of my left foot. She grabbed onto the workbench to try and hold herself down but still I lifted her and the workbench. So I grabbed onto her with one arm. Grabbed the workbench with the other arm. Put one foot on the axle to try and keep it on the floor and used the other foot to push on the trophy wrench. I had one foot on the monkey wrench, the other foot on the trophy wrench and my arm around the trophy wench who was holding on to the work bench. I was still lifting up the both of its with the leverage advantage, so it took quite a bit of balance to put most of my road hugging weight on the axle and then just push hard enough with to other leg to finally break the nut loose. I actually had to kind of jump onto the axle at the same time I was jumping onto the trophy wrench while holding onto the workbench and onto the trophy wench who was also hanging onto the workbench. Sure seemed like more than 200 foot pounds to me. Now it's Miller time.
